Everyone Has Ideas. What Do You Do With Yours?

I may be one of the few women in the country who hasn’t read The Time Traveler’s Wife, but that couldn’t stop me from going to hear Audrey Niffenegger speak Thursday.

In town to promote her new book, Her Fearful Symmetry, Niffenegger spoke with Scribner editor in chief Nan Graham in a Smithsonian Associates event. Dressed in a long black outfit with a touch of Goth, Niffenegger talked the influences on Her Fearful Symmetry (nineteenth-century novels and literary conventions), the history of London’s Highgate Cemetery, and her creative process.

Everyone has ideas, she said. “The question is, are you going to grab one and ask it questions?”

That’s a valid question in itself. Like many writers, I keep an ongoing story idea file that is perpetually overstuffed with clippings and printouts. I have a digital version in my email, where I tuck away email messages that contain story leads and potential sources for the always-upcoming news meeting. But the size of those two folders--paper and electronic—is dwarfed by the ideas for articles, stories, books, blog posts, crafts, and goals professional and personal that swirl so frequently in my mind.

Even stories that are fully reported, with their interview notes indexed by source with colorful post-its, can languish in my notebook as I at times lose my motivation to bring that story idea to reality.

It reminds me of this New Yorker cartoon, which to me perfectly illustrates the crazy synergistic process that has to happen in a writer’s mind (or at least my writer’s mind) before a story begins to flow onto the page.

But too often we get stuck long before we plot out our project in post-its.

Niffenegger suggested tonight that writer’s block is really a sign that a person needs to go back and reframe the question that they’re asking.  I agree to a point. One of the most valuable newspaper writing seminars I ever attended essentially said the same thing that if you’re having trouble writing a piece, you probably didn’t organize it well. If you’re having trouble organizing, then you probably didn’t think through your reporting. And if your reporting is going poorly, then you need to reconsider the initial premise of the story.

However, an attack of writer’s block (or the crafting, athletic, or artistic equivalent) assumes you had the courage to risk writing that story in the first place. To me, that’s what Niffenegger means when she talks about the difference between people who have ideas and people who ask those ideas questions. The first group is content to daydream; the second is willing to consider what it might take to bring that idea to life.

Which type of person are you?