Where exactly do you get your ideas?
I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?”
I can answer that with some specificity. I get my ideas at a wobbly, caramel-colored Ikea table that serves as my desk. That’s where I get my ideas — or at least a lot of them.
I can also tell you when I get my ideas. I get my ideas between 6:30 and 6:45 a.m.
This is because I spend 15 minutes every morning brainstorming ideas. I consider this ritual a crucial and delightful part of my day.
Many people I admire are struck by the Muse at random times: in the shower or while driving down the freeway. I once read that Swiss inventor Georges de Mestral got burrs on his socks during a hike, and - eureka! - came up with the idea for Velcro.
Sometimes I too will have these on-the-road inspirations.
But just as often, my ideas come during a structured 15-minute daily brainstorming session. I do my mental workout soon after I wake up (I’m still on the Ben Franklin schedule from my Constitution book, so I get up around 5:30 a.m.). Regimented creativity might seem paradoxical, but it works for me. If I don’t carve out an appointment with the Muse, the day will slip away. There are always meetings to attend, emails to answer, subreddits to click on.
Occasionally, I’ll have a goal in mind when I brainstorm. If a magazine has asked me to write an article on being a sibling, I might come up with a dozen sibling-themed ideas.
But far more often, it’s just a free-ranging brainstorming session. I’ll just let my mind grab onto a random topic (snowmen, chess, the laws of physics), and I’ll scribble down a series of twists and variations and quarter-baked notions.
It’s important to stress that ninety-eight percent of the ideas I generate during these 15 minutes are useless. They’re too weird or too dumb or both. Here are some typical rejects:
Icebreaker conversation cards for dogs
Such as, “If you could pee on anything in the world, what would you pee on?”
The Modern-Day Labors of Hercules
a. Try to cancel Amazon Prime
b. Get through an American Airlines phone tree and actually speak to a human
c. Find a Gen Z person who is not into astrology
etc.
Remake the movie The Sneeze
The Sneeze was the first copyrighted movie, a 10-second clip of a man sneezing, which Thomas Edison’s studio produced. What if we convince Scorsese, Tarantino, Jordan Peele, and Greta Gerwig to each direct their version of a reboot?
As you can see, these ideas aren’t going anywhere. But despite the high rate of useless hogwash, I still find my brainstorming exercise helpful to my career.
First, I think that creativity is a muscle. The more you train your brain to generate ideas, the easier it becomes to generate ideas. My daily fifteen-minute workouts are like high-intensity interval training for my imagination.
Second, among the useless gibberish, I’ll find an occasional germ of an idea that will grow into something real — an article, a book, a post, a project.
For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I was brainstorming about green rooms at theaters and how they usually are not green. It reminded me that black boxes on airplanes aren’t black (they’re orange so that they can be found should the worst happen). I asked myself: What other colorful phrases are about things that aren’t actually that color? I scribbled down a handful — silver screen, pink slip, blue blood.
I later turned the idea into a puzzle for my podcast, The Puzzler.
Here’s another example: A few weeks ago, I saw a headline in The Week about an Oklahoma school official who said the Bible should be used in the math curriculum. This led to my brainstorming biblical math problems, such as:
Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3). If he lay with one wife or concubine every night, but took off one day per week for rest, how many days would it take him to lay with all of his wives and concubines?
I wrote a couple of these math problems up as a Facebook post, and it went semi-viral.
And here’s an example from a few years ago: One of my sons left a Valentine's Day heart candy on my desk. During my 15 minutes, I tried to revamp the candy. What if the candy was in the shape of a real heart, with the atria and ventricles? Or in the shape of a brain, since that’s where the oxytocin is produced. This led to an essay in Esquire about rationality and love.
The candy heart was a nice prop for my brainstorming. I like to give stuff for my mind to grasp onto. This includes physical objects, but I also sometimes look at The Week magazine, old photos, upstract.com (an aggregator of Internet memes), and even my beloved Encyclopedia Britannica.
I scribble my ideas using a stylus on a Remarkable tablet, which is an annoyingly expensive iPad-like gadget. I feel I’m more creative when writing longhand. Before switching to the tablet, I went through dozens of spiral notebooks.
As for the actual brainstorming, I’ve developed various strategies. I feel those strategies merit their own post, which I’ll write up soon, but as a preview, they include: reversing a concept, pushing an idea to its illogical extreme, and tweaking a part of the whole (e.g. on a snowman, what if we replace the pipe with a vape pen?)
I’m a huge fan of the Morning Brainstorm Workout. It’s one of my top recommendations when I’m asked by beginning writers for advice. It works for me, and I hope it might work for you too.
Maybe Solomon “bundled” a few to make up time?
Huh. Interesting idea. I do morning pages, as Julia Cameron recommends. Mostly it's just a brain dump but some ideas come out of it. I've learned to just keep writing the 3 longhand pages without stopping, but if there's something in there that I need to get back to later, I just put a mark by that line and tend to it after I finish. Otherwise, I come to 45 minutes later after researching the latest in Halloween costumes for cats.