Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.

—Paul Graham

when you're just starting out on a project, when you're in that early stage where you're still trying to figure out what you want to write in the first place—at this stage, it's the frailty of memory that causes problems. This is because most good ideas (whether they're ideas for narrative structure, a particular twist in the argument, or a broader... See more

The barrier to bring any idea to reality is to admit that the way that you do so might be inadequate. It is to acknowledge that you may not do that idea justice, but that you are going to create anyway. Because as soon as an idea is created, it is now something . Something that can be held, touched, read, looked at, questioned . And it’s far for mo... See more

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push... See more

Ideas rarely come to you fully formed. So break your format into distinct elements, which you can easily identify, record, and eventually, combine.

If an idea would have a life-cycle i would say: first it manifests as rather abstract feeling, Guided by that feeling you go on search for a form that the feeling can be born into. Once you find a matching shape–the magic happens.

Many ideas are provisional: they have yet to be fully grasped, made explicit, connected to what they should be connected to, had all their components implemented, carved at the joints, made available for use, indexed. Many important ideas are provisional. Playing with provisional ideas helps nurture them.