Open the Door
There’s a question that any author will get asked at least once:
Where do you get your ideas?
They all have different answers. Stephen King said that if you have to ask, you shouldn’t become a writer. Murakami said it’s about paying attention. George R.R. Martin said that ideas are cheap, and has even suggested that his own work isn’t very original. Joyce Carol Oates, with one of the more helpful answers, said that inspiration comes from the act of writing itself.
It’s only natural to ask this question. To wonder if there is some secret magic that the great idea-havers possess that we don’t. Where are all the good ideas?
This idea problem extends beyond writing. Years ago, I briefly moved to Croatia. I went alone. I was unemployed. I didn’t meet many people there. And I was just sitting there at a lonely beach by the quiet little bay, in a small town in a strange place where I did not know the language, thinking—what now? I felt all out of ideas. I felt stuck. When I asked for advice, people would tell me I needed to “find myself” or “search for my passion” and that things would “fall into place”. My impression was that I was supposed to go meditate on a mountaintop until the perfect idea showed up. And, well, that was more intimidating than it was inspiring. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.
But there was another, more effective approach right in front of me: to open the door. In other words, the most effective way for me to get good ideas was not to sit around and wait for them to occur. It was to take action so that the ideas could arrive. To start before I knew what I was doing.
One visualization is to think about your mind like a great big hallway with thousands of doors. A Monsters Inc. sort of thing. Each of those mind-doors houses a different kind of idea. When a door is open, ideas can flow through the hallway and make their way to you. When it’s closed, you aren’t getting ideas.
Some of your mind-doors are already open. Like your cooking door (assuming you aren’t one of those ten-times-a-week Doordash people). Or the doors you use at your job. If you’re dating, your clever lines I can say at a bar on a first date door might be open. You’re getting ideas in all of these departments.
So what do you do if you want ideas in another department? Like writing ideas?
You create a reason to have them. We did not start this blog with hundreds of ideas. All we had was a couple of rough drafts in a folder. Now, we get ideas all of the time. That’s because we’ve opened the door. I can say with complete confidence that most of the essays on this website would not exist, not even as ideas, if we had not started the blog. It has been a fun door to open. [0]
Some startup founders are well-versed at opening the door. Slack famously started out as an internal communications tool for a video game. Twitter was founded as a side project within a company called Odeo. These stories would not have been written had the founders sat around for years, waiting to take action until they had the perfect idea. Instead, by actually doing things out in the world, they opened the door to better ideas.
It’s true that the way in which you open the door changes based on what sorts of new ideas you are trying to bring into your life. Sure, if you want to get more writing ideas, you could start a blog (or the equivalent). What if you are at a job you hate and want new work opportunities? Then maybe the way you start learning about what’s out there is to email a bunch of interesting people or start working on a new project.
There are even more convenient ways to open the door. A comedian friend of mine has built a habit of opening his Notes app every time he sees (or thinks of) something interesting—which, in turn, causes more ideas to pop up in the first place. You could also go buy a nice, physical journal that’s dedicated to letting ideas in. And that, really, is the key: letting ideas in. Starting a blog, or buying a journal, or opening the Notes app—these are not just places to put ideas. They are doors to open so you can begin having more ideas in the first place.
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[0] I have had multiple conversations with smart people in the past year who have told me that they would love to start a blog (or a Substack, or some online thing), but they just aren’t sure what they should be writing about. And I am pretty confident they will remain unsure unless they actually start.
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