Ideas

Yet another random picture from the nature reserve near my sister.

The internet is working. For now. My step-mother has very kindly humored me twice already and restarted the devil machine. The restart seems to boot the router into recognizing my computer again. I want to learn this process myself so I don't have to pester her every time. Although, ideally, it doesn't happen again, but that seems like it may be too optimistic. Hopefully it works for at least as long as it did last time which was roughly 24 hours. In any event, before my internet stopped working yesterday, I meant to post about this article from China Miéville about ideas that I found while reading Neil Gaiman's blog.

Essentially Miéville thinks it would be great if we had some online forum in which to share ideas we're not equipped to do justice ourselves.

Hank Green recently had a similar idea which he sorta took from a former high profile vlogger named Zefrank. Except Zefrank seemed to think we should go out and accomplish all our good ideas, I agree with Hank and Miéville that sometimes we're not the right people for the job.

On one hand I would LOVE it if people would go out and accomplish my ideas that I do not have the time or resources to do (like a GOOD film version of Ella Enchanted that actually stays true to the tone of the novel or a quasi-fictional biography of a famous book, like Machivelli's The Prince, and how it's affected people through history). This also might work better for giant coorporations, particularly film companies and maybe publishers and other distributors of creative work. It could be like a giant suggestion box and people could toss ideas they want to see at these companies and then these companies can decide which ideas seem the most popular (thus earning them the most money).

On the other hand, this is a situation where the givers aren't as useful to the process as the takers, and I see myself as primarily a giver in this type of situation. I have plenty of ideas to give, but the idea of taking another person's idea holds no appeal to me. It's also just not necessary. I barely enough time or inclination to accomplish the ideas I CAN accomplish. I guess I have met people who ask writers and artists where they get their ideas. These people puzzle me. A life where you don't have at least ten perfectly viable ideas for your own particular craft simmering somewhere in the back of your mind is completely unfathomable to me. I also get really annoyed (and know I'm not the only one) when people begin any conversation with the words "You should write..."

Excuse me? I should write? What about YOU should write? You thought of it! Why are you dumping the work on me? I should write my own ideas! Plus, using another person's idea for me is usually about as appealing as wearing someone else's underwear. Of course, I've been inspired by things people have said before. And sometimes I respond better when people jokingly say I should do something but clearly don't think I will. But there has honestly been only TWO times someone actually seriously said "You should write..." and I agreed with them and wrote it. In both instances this was only because the idea was already banging around in my head anyway, so it wasn't really their idea, just their suggestion that I write down my own idea.

But everybody's different. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments. Would you actually want to take other people's ideas from something like a giant spare ideas jar?