Writing and Creating ~ From the Medium newsletter

[Julie]

“If you take an idea and hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward that goal.” — Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter and Medium, in his book Things a Little Bird Told Me

One of the keys to writing — or creating anything meaningful — is landing on an idea that interests you enough that you’ll want to hold it in your head for weeks (or months, or years). But where on Earth do these ideas come from? It’s an age-old philosophical quandry (where do any of our thoughts come from?)

Illustrator Tom Froese believes the best ideas arise organically through testing them out in rough drafts. Alison Gee notices memorable ideas come to her when she’s distracted by something else (that’s my experience too), even if the “something” she’s doing is just showering or folding laundry. “When our minds become quiet enough, our capacity to process… information is temporarily expanded, allowing the spontaneous ideas to flow in.”

In a longread on Medium last fall, Doc Burford, a game designer who created Adios (2021) and Hardspace (2020) among other bestselling games, shared his idea generation “secrets.” One tip that stuck with me? You have to think about why someone will care. “Not about you, but about the story.” Designing a game essentially means creating a world that people care about enough to inhabit. “We make stories to help process our emotions — even Bambi is about human feelings,” he writes, “even if the characters themselves are deer.”

“It’s designed to be entertaining to the human mind; the deer aren’t really deer at all, you know?”

As Burford explains it, every good story is two stories: There’s the story on the surface (a young deer growing up in the forest) and the deeper universal story reaching deep into people’s psyches (growing up and confronting the cold, harsh world… and becoming who you actually are). The interplay between them creates what Burford believes is real creativity — instead of just copying.

— Harris Sockel