Where Do Ideas Come From?

Over the past couple of years, since I started this newsletter and began, somehow, to place a few pieces in actual publications, I have had at least a dozen colleagues ask me some version of the same question:

“How do you come up with things to write about?”

I usually give some version of the same answer.

“Well, that’s kind of the whole issue, isn’t it?”

Which is not especially satisfying, but it has the advantage of being true.

Because that really is the hard part, though it’s not the only hard part. I have spent enough evenings moving commas around to know craft can be a grind. Revision can be brutal. Time is its own little tyrant. There are weeks when I look back and think the miracle was that anything got written at all between the meetings, emails, family obligations, half-finished books, and general exhaustion of being a person with a busy calendar.

Still, for me, the sentences usually come later. First there has to be something worth fighting with a sentence over.

I don’t mean having an opinion. Opinions are everywhere. The internet has settled that question forever. There are opinions enough to choke on. A point of view is rarer. Real attention is not common. Having something to say is not merely having an opinion. It usually begins as a bother. Something small follows you around and won’t leave you alone.

People sometimes ask the question as if writing begins when a person sits down at a desk and thinks, “Now I will invent a topic.” I suppose some writing happens that way. Mine almost never does. For me, an essay or story usually begins while I am supposed to be doing something else.

Last year, I was driving home through Southwest Philadelphia and passed a vacant lot. In it was a boy, maybe eight years old, with his bicycle flipped upside down. He was crouched over it, trying to fix whatever had gone wrong. I saw him for only a second. I was in traffic. By the time I had really noticed him, I had already passed by.

That should have been the end of it.

A boy. A bike. A vacant lot. One small scene glimpsed through a windshield.

But for the rest of the drive, I kept thinking about him. Not in any grand or sentimental way at first. I just remembered being young and having an adult show me how to put the chain back on my bike. I remembered the embarrassment of not knowing how to do it. I remembered the relief of someone older kneeling down beside me, turning the pedal with one hand, guiding the chain back into place with the other, making the whole thing seem less mysterious than it had been.

And then, for days, the image would not leave me alone.

The boy in the lot. The upside-down bicycle. The absence of the adult I had been lucky enough to have. The question of who teaches a child how things get put back together.

Eventually I had to relent and write something about it.

That became “Slack,” a short story that was published last year and later nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology.

Which is not to say I knew any of that when I passed the vacant lot. I did not see the boy and think, “Ah, there is a literary opportunity.” God help us all if everyone starts moving through the world that way. I just noticed something, almost too late. Then I kept noticing it. That, more than anything, is where ideas come from.

The only advice I can offer is annoying because it is so simple.

Read.

Write.

There is not much else to it, at least not at the beginning.

Read works deeply and regularly. Some weeks it is a novel, some weeks an essay, some weeks a psalm, some weeks a strange little article about zoning or bird migration or the decline of cursive handwriting. Nobody applauds. Nobody says, “Congratulations, your interior life has just expanded by 0.3 percent.”

You read Marilynne Robinson and find yourself taking quiet rooms more seriously. You read George Saunders and remember that absurdity is not the opposite of tenderness. You read a Gospel parable for the hundredth time and discover that you are not the merciful character in the story this time. You read some throwaway sentence in an article you were barely paying attention to, and three days later it attaches itself to a conversation in the hallway.

This is one reason I have become skeptical of the idea that writing is merely self-expression. Sometimes it is. But often we borrow other people’s words until our own begin to do the job.

Most of life is small things. Reading proves such things are available to notice. Writing makes it harder to look away, and the key is to make an uncompromising habit out of it. Writing consistently means writing while tired, distracted, unconvinced, slightly resentful, and fairly sure you are wasting your time.

The weekly practice helps because it creates an appointment with my own attention. Whether I feel ready or not, I have to sit down and ask what has stayed with me. At first, that feels like pressure. After a while, the pressure follows you out of the chair. You start noticing things before you know why you are noticing them. Your subconscious is preparing for the moment when it knows you will be back to sitting with your laptop and the blink of a cursor.

That is the part I did not expect.

I thought regular writing would mostly train me at the desk. Instead, it changed how I moved through the rest of the week. A conversation in the hallway catches differently. A passing irritation at work becomes harder to dismiss. You find yourself wondering why that bothered you, what you expected instead, and what assumption you had been carrying without knowing it. Whatever it is, you become gripped by the unrelenting thought that “there’s something in there.”

The world does not necessarily become more interesting.

You become more interested.

The question changes from “What should I write about?” to “Why won’t this leave me alone?”

That is when the better ideas start coming, at least for me.

The ground has to be prepared. Books in the mind. Time in the chair. Enough repetition that noticing becomes an automatic habit. Eventually you can just feel when something is asking to be thought about. It declares itself to you.

No one is going to monetize this advice very effectively. Read a lot. Write often. Pay attention. It is dull advice, which is probably how you know it is serious. But I do think it is true. The people I know who always have material are rarely the ones living the most cinematic lives. They are the ones who do not throw away what is ordinary. They have learned to walk around consciously, at least more of the time.

That is what writing has done for me, more than anything else. It has made the world less disposable. Conversations linger. Small scenes come back. A moment is less likely to remain only a moment. It takes on a new life.

So, when people ask how I come up with things to write about, I still do not have a helpful soundbite to offer them. I read, I write, and I try to catch myself in the act of noticing. Then, every so often, I sit down long enough to find out why. Give it a try.

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