The Idea

I have this personal philosophy that I tend to stick to pretty rigidly: your first idea is usually a bad one, so choose another...but maybe skip the second, third, and fourth ideas too. 

This philosophy can be utilized to great effect in every creative field. But since I'm a writer, I'll only focus on how it helps my writing.

The reasoning behind this is because sometimes a concept is so widely known that it becomes the first thing people think of when they hear a word or phrase. My next book is titled "Under a Black Rainbow," and it feels a little too on the nose (and just wrong, contextually) to do a cover with a rainbow that's colored in all the shades of black and white and everything gray between. What Rob and I have come up with, conceptually, for the next cover is infinitely more interesting and engaging and will definitely make people stop to really pore over the design before they even crack the book open.

Think of your immediate first idea as if the entirety of all your ideas are being ranked by Google. It shows up at the top because so many people have already thought of it and searched for it (or, written about it/created it/it's a cliche now/it's a trope now/it's a common symbol for a theme/etc.). It's the first idea that comes because it's the obvious choice, the one EVERYONE will gravitate toward in their heads.

IGNORE THE URGE TO USE THAT IDEA. 

It's almost assuredly a bad one and it's very nearly guaranteed to have been implemented by someone else already. Skip to the bottom of the page of your Google-ranked ideas page. Better yet, skip directly to page 10 or page 53. Utilize the idea that almost no one is expecting. Surprise your audience with something that feels like it's going right down the middle and then veers so widely left or right that people can't help but stop and take notice.

When I went looking for images for this blog, I typed "the idea" in the search bar. The first 20 or 30 images were all of lit up lightbulbs, which is unsurprising since the lightbulb has become the kind of standard-bearer for this particular concept. Which means I will never use it to convey the concept of "the idea" myself. It's overdone, it's dead, it's become uninteresting conceptually.

Then I went looking for "the brain" and got some very basic images of the brain. Turning my search phrase into "surreal brain" brought up a huge repository of more interesting, engaging images that feel more appropriate to this text. They evoke something visceral in the viewer, even if the viewer thinks they may not totally understand the nature of the image.

I say all this because it's already incredibly difficult for most creatives to stand out from their peers in a way that makes a large majority of people stand up and take notice. If we continue creating the same trite, overdone, cliched concepts or products, then we are simply sacrificing ourselves, our time, and our art for nothing. We are not propelling our endeavors forward because we have become complacent and are happy to remain stuck in the creative mud.

When I actively put this philosophy to work, what I've found is that my stories not only end up surprising me while I'm writing them, but they also end up surprising my readers, many of whom really appreciate the fact that they can't see the ending coming.

This is probably just a long-winded way of saying "don't take the easy route; the more difficult one is the more enjoyable one and will help you produce something of a higher quality that more people will take notice of."

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