A Nugget of an Idea
A Nugget of an Idea
I had an idea. I was thinking about how funny Time can be. How an event can feel like it was just yesterday and ten years ago, all at once. I wrote to myself, Time Is a Tricky Witch and I liked it. It made me laugh. Then, a whole narrative emerged where Time was a tricky witch who’d enrolled a nice old man with a long beard to represent her — so whenever anyone had a complaint, they went to Father Time instead of her and she was as free to make as much mischief with time as she wanted.
I liked this idea. It felt really fun. I sat with it for a while, pulled it in a few directions but I quickly realized that it was an idea with nowhere to go. It doesn’t have much more to it, so it couldn’t really be its own story — and there’s nothing else I have going, into which I could fold it. It’s an idea nugget, a complete little something that is unlikely to become anything more.
It seems to me that knowing what KIND of idea I’m having is a useful distinction that I’ve only been able to really identify in later years. I feel like in my youth, I would think, “Oh, I’ve had this great witch idea and now I must develop it!” And then I’d bang my head against the idea for a few days, trying to get something out of it.
But some ideas are just passing ideas and some ideas catch hold of me and send me racing. Knowing that an idea is not one that is likely to catch fire means I can just have the idea and let it go. I can enjoy it for a few moments, develop it as far as I feel it can go and then let it be. If I find a place for it in the future, cool. That’d be cool but it’s fine to let it fade back into the idea soup.
I do think, though, that developing an idea as far as it wants to go is a key stage of it. When something bubbles up, you don’t know if it’s a little thing or a big thing. To find out you have to embrace all ideas with interest and enthusiasm and follow them all with dedication.
I have a lot of these sentence ideas. I write them down and think “One day this will be something” — but they almost never are. They are just nugget ideas that are more or less complete and did not demand further development. They are just as important as the ideas that turn into things, though.
It feels like, with creativity, you have to throw a lot of seeds into the earth to get one idea that can grow into a fully fledged project. The more seeds/ideas you have, the more likely that something will sprout out of the ground. Most ideas are seeds with no growth but you still have to cherish them all to get one to grow. I’ve almost never gone back and developed a small stray idea — but I do think it was important that I wrote them down and gave them some consideration. It taught my brain to how to nourish ideas, cherish them, regardless of whether I can see the end game for it.
And the Time Witch says, if you have any issues with all of this, just go ahead and take them up with Father Time.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on May 7, 2023.
