Episode 9: Where do you get your ideas? With Mo Willems — Kids Ask Authors
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Episode 9: Where do you get your ideas? With Mo Willems — Kids Ask Authors
The mathematical genius Alexander Grothendieck once had a metaphor for solving problems. He suggested that instead of forcing open an impossibly hard kernel with a hammer and chisel, one should simply let it sit in water and wait. Over time, the shell softens and opens with ease. This is also true in writing; time is the only non-substitutable ingr... See more
Epiphanies Come From Waiting
Ideas sometimes seem to need days or weeks or months to get to a point where they feel fully formed. If you try to force a solution to a problem into a preset window of time, you will almost certainly reach a suboptimal solution.
I’ll often have ideas sitting in my focus folder for weeks or months and keep tossing thoughts into them, and then one d... See more
I’ll often have ideas sitting in my focus folder for weeks or months and keep tossing thoughts into them, and then one d... See more
Nat Eliason • The Art of Fermenting Great Ideas
In nature, some seeds lie dormant in anticipation of the season most conducive to their growth. This is true of art as well. There are ideas whose time has not yet come. Or perhaps their time has come, but you are not yet ready to engage with them. Other times, developing a different seed may shed light on a dormant one.
Rick Rubin • The Creative Act: A Way of Being
I feel like I say this to a lot of people, especially aspiring fiction writers. In my experience, it is really important to do two things.
One: You have to train yourself to notice things. It's not 100% natural at first – it certainly wasn’t for me – but raising those antennae is a very worthwhile thing to do. And it snowballs: once I got started ta... See more
One: You have to train yourself to notice things. It's not 100% natural at first – it certainly wasn’t for me – but raising those antennae is a very worthwhile thing to do. And it snowballs: once I got started ta... See more