“Many ideas come to mind when I’m away from my desk. I can be doing anything—loading the laundry, eating dinner, talking on the phone, gardening, reading the newspaper, watching TV, walking or driving—when all of a sudden an idea will pop into my head. Here’s the thing: I always make sure to write down the idea or remind myself on my smartphone right away. If I don’t do it right away, I’ll not only forget the idea, I’ll regret it. For a writer, a pen and paper or smartphone are a must to have at all times, even on your nightstand, because you never know when an idea will come a-knockin’.”
– Joseph Sutton, This Writing Life
__________
“Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.” Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you “like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.
– Tom Waits, interviewed by Elizabeth Gilbert, “Play it Like Your Hair’s on Fire,” GQ 2002 (as quoted by Austin Kleon https://austinkleon.com/tag/jerry-seinfeld/)
__________
Ideas come knocking at anytime.
Can we hear them?
Is there a doorbell?
Ideas don’t need a sacred space in which to bloom.
They are like the 12 hour delivery window.
You are forced to stay at home all day simply for the pleasure of taking delivery of a piece of furniture.
For that day, the new sofa has power over you.
You can choose to spend the day distracted and frustrated, peeking out of the curtain, tutting.
Or you could get on with some housework, do some tidying, get cooking. When you have forgotten all about the delivery, there is a knock on the door.
Ideas are like that. They have power over you if you try to force them into existence.
If I sit down and try to will myself to come up with a compelling subject for a blog post, then I will quickly feel I will never write an original line again.
But if I put the dinner on, drive to work, shower, anything else but sit and think and stare, then those pesky ideas come out to play.
And I am ready.
Once they are captured and recorded, then I have the power.
I can peak into my collection jar and pick out the ideas that resonate.
I am always collecting. but never expectant.
Conversations With Quotations 