I Can't Get The Ideas Out!

    I can't get the ideas out!

    I'll have this great idea for an article, but then when I go to write it down, it just lays there. I might get one sentence out, the sentence which broadly encompasses the idea, but then nothing else follows. The thing just lays there.
    Perhaps even worse is when I have a run of ideas: I'll have one idea, then before I can even think of writing it down, another idea flows fast upon it, then (still before I can think of writing either idea down) yet another idea rushes in. The end result is usually that I am so overwhelmed by my subconscious puking a torrent of creativity at me that nothing gets saved. It all ends up in the sewers of time, polluting the great ocean of " collective thought."

    (INSERT PRIMAL SCREAM OF YOUR CHOICE)

    Yeah, I know, there are people who would kill to have these torrents of ideas to play with. It's the question every writer hates: "Where do you get your ideas?" (I liked Agatha Christie's answer which was the British equivalent of "I usually pick them up by the dozen at J.C. Penney." Cute, Agatha.) Believe me, though, this is its own form of torture. It's one thing to be able to do something with the ideas, it's quite another to have them fly up in your face and then have them flit away, all uncaught, like being an entomologist who just happened upon a group of butterflies long-thought extinct only to discover he has a hole in his net.
    But let's say, I do happen to catch one of these little suckers, surely all is right with the world then! I wish. Remember how this article started? Most times when I go to write it down I experience the tortuous process of drawing the idea out. It's like pulling a terrified puppy into the vet leash first. Sometimes I can't even remember what the idea meant to begin with. I look at my notes and am left thinking, "Gee, I know this meant something to me at the time, but now I haven't the foggiest idea what!" You know, kinda like seeing an old girlfriend and wondering, forget the three years you spent with her, why the hell did you even ask her out?!
    See, we all have our little problems and difficulties. Some people might kill to have this many ideas, they think not having enough ideas is their problem, but if they did suddenly have that which they think to be their problem removed, they would just as suddenly find something else to be "their problem." Life is like that. It's the great "grass is greener" trap, with a guy standing on either side of a fence looking across at the other and thinking how much better that guy's life is than his own.

    People, there are always problems. There are always difficulties. It's called life, live with it.

    That said, I'll plod along with this problem, trying to find ways to overcome it, maybe succeeding, maybe not. And, hey!, I think I just got one of those ideas out after all!!   ;-)




Los Angeles, CA
March 1st, 1999