https://medium.com/steve-peha-be-a-better-wrimo/where-do-ideas-come-from-b8c94660abd4
Where Do Ideas Come From?
Nov 5, 2019
154
I took a writing class in college. It wasn’t a prose writing class; it was a music writing class. But it’s the best example I have of what I want to tell you right now, so it’ll have to do.
There were only 12 of us in the class. We all arrived before the professor. We made sure of that because the professor was the Chairman of the Music Department.
He wasn’t an easy man to get to know. He had come to our small inconsequential school from a larger school of greater consequence. He was known as a serious man and an accomplished composer. He was much older than anyone else in the department. He came not only from a different place but also a different time.
As the clock pushed past our scheduled start, I think some of us began hoping he wouldn’t show up at all, that somehow the class would be cancelled, and that we’d all receive full credit and “A” grades. I mean, we did show up early, right?
But Then…
About fifteen after the hour, he drifted in from the back of the room. He nodded to us as he reached the front and looked around as if he didn’t know where he was. Soon enough, he found his spot in the corner of the room and sat down behind the upright piano just a few feet away from me.
I’m a front-row sitter; I like to be close to the knowledge. Now I was close to the Chairman.
He wore a perpetual frown. I’d heard it was because he’d had a mild stroke and that he was actually gregarious and good-natured. But he spoke rarely to students, and when he did, he spoke softly, and with a stroke-faced seriousness that made it seem as though he had only bad news to deliver.
He was not tall. Sitting down on the bench, he disappeared. Then he backed up a bit, changed his angle, peered over the top — right at me — and started playing. Not a piece, or at least not a piece I knew, just notes and chords, slow, simple combinations that sounded neither bad nor especially good.
That is the Question
He looked at me again: “Where do ideas come from?” he asked over the piano top. I looked at him, tried to smile, failed, and slumped down in my chair.
“Where do ideas come from?” he repeated.
He continued to play, more vigorously now. He looked around the piano and fixed his gaze on Bob Sacamano: “Where do ideas come from?” the Chairman asked.
Having no doubt studied my attempt at controlled failure, Bob declined to comment using the universally accepted shoulder-shrug favored by so many of us undergrads, especially freshmen like me and Bob.
That’s how class went for a while: the Chairman playing and questioning, his students mute, addled, stymied — just like we were most of the time, but not in front of the Chairman.
The Beginning Begins at the End
A few minutes later, his playing softened, then slowed. With his hands creeping toward the farthest ends of the keyboard, he lightly depressed a low note and a high note simultaneously to finish his improvisation.
“I was in World War II, you know. I was a pilot,” he said, steadying himself on the piano as he rose to his feet. “I was a pilot. Flew 18 missions. Mostly over France.”
We still weren’t talking. But at least he wasn’t asking us to.
He continued telling war stories for a few minutes in front of the class. Gradually, he moved back to the piano and began again to play a piece that I decided was called, Where Do Ideas Come From? (With War Stories).
I tuned out. I wanted him to tell me where ideas come from. I didn’t want to hear any more war stories, either.
I stopped listening and started doodling. The Chairman kept talking and continued playing.
“Did you know I was a prisoner of war?” He said.
That snapped me to attention.
Things Get Serious
“On that 18th mission, we were shot down. Some of us parachuted out. Some didn’t. I broke my right leg when I hit the ground. The next morning, I was captured. For almost a year…”
I don’t remember much after that. I was too stunned. Profs told stories in class all the time, but not stories like this, not stories about life and death.
All the while, he kept on playing, his music changing with his mood as he shared with us a part of his life I never imagined.
Forty minutes into our 50-minute class, he stopped playing, stood up, (he knew he had our attention now), and said, “So, where do ideas come from? Think about it.”
I was thinking about it now.
“That’s enough for today,” he said as he shuffled toward the exit. Then, he stopped as he reached for the door knob: “I’ll be off campus all day on Friday. Some meeting at the legislature. I won’t see you again until next week. Take the time and think about it: Where do ideas come from? Then bring me a few ideas of your own.”
I never did figure out where ideas come from. Not in that class anyway. And I was too intimidated by the Chairman to ask him directly. I did, however, figure out what he was trying to tell us — ten years later when I started teaching writing.
Looking Back
A famous man spent half an hour playing music and telling war stories, some of which were deeply personal. If I had known the man better I might have said that his experience of war defined him in some way as it does so many people. I’m sure his experience influenced the kind of music he wrote.
That was his point.
Where do ideas come from? They come from our lives. They come, particularly, from the most important experiences of our lives and the most important things we think and feel about our lives.
Whether we’re writing fiction, nonfiction, or even music, ideas, at least the ones worth the effort it takes to communicate them, come from deep inside us, sometimes from places we don’t even know exist.
We Have to Dig For It
Art doesn’t just show up. We have to create it, seemingly out of nothing. But we don’t create it out of nothing, we create it out of ourselves.
We dig deep for our art. Most often what we’re digging into is the sum of our experiences and the feelings we have about them. These experiences also include the books we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen, the TV we’ve watched, and the stories people have told us about their lives.
Ideas come from life: how we think we’ve lived it and how we think it can be lived. Ideas come from everything we know of other people’s lives, too, and everything we’ve learned about the world. Wild flights of fancy swoop down to find us; cold-sweated nightmares swirl up from depths we didn’t know we possessed.
It’s all in there somewhere.