098 How to Grab Great Ideas (Without Using Your Hands)

The Transcript

How to Grab Great Ideas (Without Using Your Hands)

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Demian Farnworth: Howdy, and you are listening to Rough Draft, your daily dose of essential web writing advice. I am Demian Farnworth. Your host, your muse, your digital recluse, and the Chief Content Writer for Copyblogger Media.

And thank you for sharing the next few minutes of your life with me.

It’s funny. How we forget things. Sublime reflections and exalted ideas. Like they were never even there. But if they were so sublime and exalted, why did they not remain with us?

And it’s funny how we fear losing these ideas. The lengths we will go to preserve them. The legends are legion.

Keeping waterproof slates in your shower. Talking into your phone’s voice memo while you pump gas on a dusty August day. Scribbling in your tiny notepad in the dark of night so you don’t wake your spouse. In the morning light, however, the handwriting is illegible. You might have well been drunk.

I know. I’ve done it.

The First Four Rules of Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules of Writing

Look at the first four rules of Margaret Atwood’s 10 rules for writing:

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

These are all about preserving your work, your ideas. That’s forty percent. The other rules, the ones devoted to the craft of writing, have to share the remaining sixty. Think about that.

The premium we place on ideas.

But at what point do you draw the line when it comes to stopping what you are doing to record an idea: how many times do you interrupt the family dinner? The mowing of the lawn? The cross-country run? How many times do you wake up in the middle of the night to write that rare never before thought idea down in your diary?

Not to mention, there’s the risk you may interrupt the full blossoming of an idea if you prematurely stop what you are doing to write it down.

Well, this is what do you do when you can’t — or don’t — want to stop to write down an idea: either memorize it or concoct a narrative around it.

Let me show you how these work.

What to Do If You Want to Memorize Something

Memorize the idea means nothing more than repeating it until you burn it in your memory. Perhaps it was a cute little sentence that will be perfect for opening up an article. Repeat it over and over again. Just like you would memorize any other fact.

How to Let an Idea Unfold By Concocting a Narrative

Concocting a narrative means nothing more than allowing the idea to unfold. For instance, the roads I run on are surrounded by woods and farm fields. We are outside of city limits. We are in the country. And people shoot guns in the country.

I don’t go a day without hearing a shot fired. Somewhere far away, of course. Maybe they’re scaring away a coyote or banging a quail. Nevertheless, near enough to send my brain into a creative rampage. And the only way I can corral these ideas is to embed them into a story — with vivid milestones.

When I get home I take a shower and eat breakfast. When I finally sit down at my desk I open one of my notebooks, mechanical pencil in hand, and use those milestones to walk my way back to the original idea. That’s concocting a narrative to save an idea from oblivion.

What Happens When We Hoard Ideas

Now let’s address something else that occurs. We hoard ideas so we don’t have to deal with the blank page. And we accumulate, store, and organize those ideas.

Some of us are better at this than others. If you are like me, then you are a vacuum. Nothing is sacred. You swallow the world around you like a renegade sink hole.

Books, articles, videos, movies, songs, images, conversations. The best of us can’t keep up with it all. It is the back of a cereal box at breakfast. An American Scientific article in the bathroom. A TED talk while you sit in your dentist’s chair. So many ideas you are stuffing into your brain, and then stuffing into your notebooks.

Then there’s the stack of notebooks. The stack of notecards. Napkins and sheets of paper covered with drawings, concepts, and objectives stuffed into a leather legal portfolio.

Yet we still stare at the blank page. Disabled in the face of so much material. Material that seems, after re-reading, weird at best. Wasn’t there something more profound than this?

Possibly that profoundness is still in your head. Buried. All you need to do is kick up the dirt. By picking up your journal or opening your laptop and writing: “I had this idea. Now it doesn’t seem very good, but there was something else … oh, yeah ….”

A page later and a catalog of good ideas are marching toward you.

Trust the Process

Here’s the moral of the story: trust the process. The mind engaged will pillage the ideas in your head. It’s an act of discovery. And the act of writing initiates it.

So don’t torment yourself over lost ideas. You can find them. Just trust the process.

Take care, and until next time.