How to have ideas
I’ll let you know if it works
I realized something this past week: I’m bored. It’s a feeling I thought I might never have again, and it snuck up on me, because my days are pretty full with activities I enjoy, both personal and professional. But after five years of book work, culminating in a magical period of maximum subconscious engagement, I can feel the lack of something to obsess over, something I haven’t quite figured out yet, something my brain is working on beyond my awareness. Especially something that feels like it’s all mine.
I don’t have a next idea yet, at least not one I’m ready to tell the internet about, which is ok. I didn’t expect to. But that has made me feel a little stuck, without a clear path out of the boredom. All my academic and journalistic training has taught me the idea must come before the writing. (Reporting can come before the idea, but usually there’s at least a glimmer of a question pointing me to starting that reporting in the first place.) Writing is the last step, after all the research, conversations, travel, or, god forbid, outlines. Writing, everyone has always told me, is what I’m allowed to do when I finally know what I want to say.
I’ve been hanging onto that framework for decades, even as my experience has diverged from it further and further—now, apparently, to the point of no return. One of the most exciting parts of finishing my book was that I truly didn’t know what was going to come out when I sat down to write. It would have been a worse book if I had. (I know because there were drafts I forced myself to produce like that.) So I’m begrudgingly accepting that for me, at least for certain kinds of projects, the writing might become before the idea. The not writing I thought I needed to recover from my last book might be the thing that’s keeping the idea for my next one away. Starting from nothing—embracing the nothing—feels like a huge hurdle to clear. But at least, I hope, it won’t be boring.
