Mind Sprocket: The Back Page : Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

When I first seriously considered being a writer, I was in college. I was majoring in Music, but going to a liberal arts college meant that I was also taking at least three other classes not directly related to my major.

In addition to the one Creative Writing class I was taking (finally, as a senior, I managed to get in), I was practicing the piano for at least two hours a day and taking music classes. I could also be found studying at the last minute for another Earth and Space Science test that I had forgotten about again; trying to memorize vocabulary for French class; and changing clothes after softball frantically so I could get to my part time job at a bookstore on time, where I would spend the rest of the evening either selling calendars at a kiosk in the mall or trying to persuade customers to sign up for our club card in the bookstore itself. If I was feeling awake enough after work, I’d go back to school and practice the piano some more, sometimes until security came to close the building.

Creative Writing gave me a serious reason to push a few things aside and sit down and write. After all, I had to hand assignments in like I did for any other class. Whether I was inspired to write or not, I was going to have to do it.

But writing was more difficult than I imagined. Our professor had few requirements for what we were supposed to write, and I found that having so much free reign was difficult. Where to begin? What exactly should I be writing about? I didn’t have any characters, I didn’t have a plot or an imaginary land. What I concluded was that my creative energy was pushed toward music, and any that I had left was distributed too thinly among my other classes. There just wasn’t enough left for Creative Writing.

I had little time for idle daydreams. I had little time for imagining. And so I would try to find easy ways to get ideas. Writing prompts were the solution. Little one-line ideas that I could take and run with. But even these could only take me so far, and so writing in college was largely a struggle.

I know now that writers need more than the time to write down the words. They need the time to think and dream and create. You should read this essay written by author Neil Gaiman if you don’t agree … or if you want more insight. He knows how important imagination is when you want to create a truly unique story.