Idea

Have you explored a terrain of concepts to find a central idea that can organize complexity?

An essay is consciousness frozen in words; it is an artifact that captures the thoughts, feelings, and events that transpire as you explore and makes sense of an Idea you care about. There are no rules or limits on what’s worth writing. An idea can be driven by a question or story, a dilemma or theory, a rumor, argument, confusion, war, childbirth, accidental psychedelic experience, dog euthanasia, economic indicators, toothpaste conspiracy theories, etc. It can be today’s shower-thought, yesterday’s grievance, or an idea that’s haunted you for a decade.

I hesitate to offer any prescriptive method on “how to come up with good ideas.” Sometimes they come from the belly button. My best recommendation is to write down every mild epiphany you have, ideally in prose, ideally legible enough to share with a friend, ideally 3 times per day, and if you’re crazy and jobless, 100 times per day. I’ll say this: don’t write the ideas you think you need to write about; write down what’s already passing through your mind. The best ideas come from paying attention, from patient, endless probing.

So while the idea of starting ideas is unsystematic, mystical, and mostly random, I do think there are learnable patterns in how you articulate the thing in your lap. A fisherman can go on adventures of endless variety, but there are only so many ways to skin a fish.

You can think of an essay as a collection of little ideas (your Material (1)) that all work together to support one big idea (your Thesis (2)), that you eventually compress into a crystallized idea (your Title (3)). Geometrically, ideas are about centrality. A bunch of planets orbit a central star that has to be named.

You can start at any scale. Sometimes you wake up from a dream with a Title that jingles. Sometimes you have a weird, specific Thesis (ie: the sitcom Seinfeld marked the decline of western civilization) but don’t have any evidence yet. Sometimes you collect a mosaic of Material that all seem connected through some invisible web, but you have to write to find out why.

Regardless of where you start, there are two opposite modes that help you sift through an ideascape: divergence and convergence (coined by JP Guildford in 1956). To diverge is to be open and open-minded, to chase down tangents, to imagine a world of potential in even the stupidest detail, to drop all filters and see how any thing connects to everything. To converge is to be a ruthless editor. Through divergence you discover a better center of gravity, and through convergence you let go of anything outside of its pull.

It is natural to fall in love with your own ideas, but you will have to delete a lot more than you write. An essay is not a chronological record of your thinking. Drafts are meant to be shed. Writing lets you explore the edges of your terrain; but once you’ve become a parkmaster, it’s your job to pick one landmark for someone to visit. An essay is an opportunity to share a single idea at max potency. Do not try to put the whole park in prose. You’ll kill the trees. The goal isn’t to see how much you can cram (word count is not impressive); the goal is to reach the highest possible density of meaning.

The good news is, all the ideas you cut from your current essay are seeds that can sprout into future essays. Unlike books, you’ll be able to produce many essays in your life, so have faith that each idea will have its moment. Let each one breathe, and use hyperlinks if you must. Pick one idea and take it seriously.

When ideas are properly scoped and sculpted, they become linguistic viruses that enter and change the mind of the reader, so write responsibly. By unifying a multi-dimensional range of material around a kernel of truth and giving it a name, you give somebody a new lens to their reality. The essay is folk technology that turns human experience into transferrable wisdom. We could use some of that.

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