How to have good ideas! Your Ideas Suck! But We Can Fix That.

This is how you know if your idea will work: test it for a few years.

And since you can’t do that for every thought, try this instead. It’s a rigorous, safe, and much shorter process.

Follow this process, and it’ll guide you to a decision. Do you have an idea worth time and energy? Or are you in a permanent spiral of decay?

Follow along…

Step one: have a thought — do you like it?

What you don’t need to ask is whether it’s a good thought or not.

All you need to ask at this moment is this: do you like it? Don’t need to articulate why or why not. You just need a feeling about it.

Do you like it?

If yes, then…

Step two: make it an idea — do you have confidence in it?

Important point: you haven’t had an idea yet. That’s why you don’t have confidence in it. Not quite. You have a gut feeling that it’ll work, but you ain’t quite sure how.

This is among the more critical steps. You have the gut-check, but you need to start building the thought into an idea. An idea is a seed that can grow into a real story that’ll stand on its own.

We must turn to the giants for tools.

Aaron Sorkin, zillion-times award-winning screenwriter, has this to say about ideas (I’m paraphrasing, because he’s a rambler):

If you just have a thought you like — I want to write about a beach where people surf — then you don’t have an idea. You have a soft premise.

It only becomes an idea when you can start appending phrases like “but then…!” or “when suddenly…!” or “because there was a [something] then…!”

When you can do that, and your gut check still passes, then you have an idea.

Try it with your thought a couple of times. Keep trying it until you get to one of two places:

You may find a phrase that nabs your attention — There are surfer bums, but then an undercover cop infiltrates their fun!

Or you might try it over and over again until you’re driven to a distraction. In which case, you might need to file this thought for a bit and revisit it later. And maybe go back to step one.

When you have a winner, then…

Step three: research — does your idea have cool story mojo?

Perhaps “do research” doesn’t feel like a good place to find cool mojo. But it is. Here’s why.

If you like your thought (step one, check!) and it’s achieved idea status (step two!), then you should go read about it.

Read about any odd part of it. Read about the tides, Pacific versus Atlantic. Read about undercover cops, both real and fictional. Read about sand. Read about reasons cops go undercover. Read about crime rates. Read about cool hangout spots.

Just chase down what’s interesting to you. It doesn’t have to be “serious” or seem immediately pertinent. If it’s interesting, it’s the right stuff. Make a note of it, save it somewhere you can glance at it again.

You’re not building your story here. What you’re doing is seeing if there’s a strong context for your idea. And you’re feeding yourself.

Through this process, odds are good that thoughts about events, settings, developments will start to emerge.

If, by this process, you discover your idea feels weak and thin, it’s time to go back to step two. Repeat. Possibly all the way back to step one.

If, however, your idea gets fuller and bigger and more exciting to you, then it’s time for…

Step four: organize — does the idea “work”?

This is the point when you can sort of start to outline a sort of story idea. I don’t actually advise trying to write an outline here exactly, because that might take longer than I think you ought to spend on this.

This exercise is meant to bring a thought to a place you can decide whether to spend time on it or not, remember. So don’t spend too much time on this point.

What I suggest here is actually closer to what the people in the TV business and the movie business call a “treatment.”

A treatment isn’t an outline.

It’s a description of what you want to produce.

It describes the tone. The characters. The setting.

And it describes the loosest version of the events.

If you can get to this point, with your idea-seed and the little seedling of an idea that’s been nurtured by your research, and you can produce a treatment of a story with relative ease, then that tells you something.

Step five: keep working! This is how to have good ideas.

At this point, you have either developed your thought into a usable idea. Or you have determined that it needs work. If the process has worked, then you have the foundation of the work necessary for making this decision:

Is it worth your time or not?

You can see that I slowly morphed towards talking about writing books. But I actually think this process works for any creative process. I don't know how to have good ideas. But I think I'm figuring out how to develop them.