Tag Archives: ideas

The Ideas Factory

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After a good night, much of which was passed actually asleep, I find that ideas are starting to fire up. It is, as I think I said a few posts ago, a case of the more ideas you have, the more you get. They aren’t always sensible, practical or even sane, but they are all ideas. I initially wanted to call my first idea Tommy II, a rock opera set in the Scottish Borders. However, there may be a conflict with the (currently) better known Who effort of the same name.

I then went for Recycled! as it would fit well with current Disney offerings and anything that increases the takings would be welcome. I’m in it for the cash rather than the artistry and the storytelling.

Barbie led to a worldwide shortage of pink paint, well Recycled! is going to do the same for tweed. Originally I thought of a finale which relied on friction between Gore-Tex fabric causing sparks (an idea which came from a trip my dad and I had in our winter bird-watching jackets along an undulating Fen road in a Morris Ital.  The Ital was famous for many things but interior space wasn’t one of them (or build quality, style or reliability, to be honest). We spent several miles with out sleeves audibly rubbing, and the image has stuck for almost 40 years.  I think that at the time I was about 30 and my dad about 58. I am significantly older now than he was then. There must be something about memory I can write, but it’s not quite clear at the moment.

 

Anyway, the finale with the fiery finish has been rewritten, as I can’t see tweed exploding into flames. It could, on the other hand, produce a comfortably nostalgic feeling that persists as millions of Hen Harriers descend on Scotland, after a long journey from a distant galaxy, and demand to see our Leader, who turns out to be the wife of our cycling hero. The final scene sees her being thanked for her efforts to establish the Hen Harrier Bridgehead while the fizzing of lasers and shouts of landowners in the distance indicate that the Hen Harriers are righting centuries of human wrongdoing . . .

It started as an original idea, though it does seem to have taken on definite qualities of Batteries Not Included as we get to the finale. That’s how ideas work.

However, my second main idea of the morning – Imaginerobics – may have more chance of success. You sit in your chair, you watch TV, you imagine yourself going down the luge track at Cortina, you feel the camber in the corners and the rattle of the rutted ice, and at the bottom you have had quite a workout. Same for the Curling and a variety of other sports. It sounds quite active. And when it’s over, you reach for the cup of tea and biscuits placed conveniently next to your elbow.

Poetry, you say? No, I’ve had no actual ideas for poetry, but that’s the thing about ideas, you can generate them, but you can’t control the ones you get.

 

A question to provoke more ideas – why don’t waterbirds get cold bottoms?

24 Posts 26 Days

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I suppose the title gives things away. Despite all my good intentions this will be post 24, but it is 26th January. Two days have been swallowed up by that mad whirl of naps, TV and procrastination. I can pull two days back quite easily, so it isn’t a problem for now. Be prepared for two supplementary posts over the coming days.

I had an email from an editor yesterday, two more acceptances, bringing the total for 2025 to 55. I know numbers mean nothing, because it’s about quality. But at the same time it does mean I’ve been applying myself to writing and I carried the plan through.

It’s the same with a blog a day – it doesn’t mean I’m writing better blog posts but it does, I hope, mean that I will improve because of the constant practice.

The same goes for ideas. In the past I have hoarded ideas, ready for the day when I feel that stars have aligned and the day is propitious for one of my great ideas. However, theory, and reality, seem to indicate that the more ideas you use, the more you will generate. It does seem to work.

In other contexts, I don’t consider this a good thing. Every time I think about it I remember being in a meeting once where one aspiring volunteer (or aspiring chair, if the truth is told) said “My strength is having ideas. If anyone needs an idea, just ask.”

What still makes me grit my teeth at this, is that everyone can have ideas, but what you need on a committee is people who will work.

That’s the secret with most things. I can have all the ideas I like, but if I don’t work, nothing happens. That’s why quantity is important, it means you are doing the work which will lead to quality. And if you are doing the work and achieving the quality, you may, with luck, become good.

Sunset at Sherwood

 

Sixteen Swimming Swans

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Mute Swan – Rufford Abbey

This morning I thought of several poems whilst I was on the way back from dropping Julia off. This is the same time frame where I used to have all my best ideas. My brain is awake but the task of driving on a fairly clear road is not too demanding. At that point thoughts come into my head. I actually had my first idea before we left home, had a second as I dropped her off and had several more on the way home. No pad, no voice recorder, just me repeating things to myself.

When I reached home I noted the ideas down and wrote the prose sections for five haibun. That’s more than I did in the last months – the ones I’ve submitted have all been written for ages and I have merely worked my way through them without originating anything. They have had a few tweaks, and have needed a haiku or a tanka here and there, but generally all my recent acceptances have been written for months. That, of course, is how it is supposed to be. People who know these things advise leaving work to mature.

Mute Swan at Clumber Park

I just looked back and realise that I have had three months this year when I have submitted nothing and that everything I have had accepted since March has been, and been rejected, at least once.

Since this morning I have had two more ideas, though I have not settled to write them yet. Even poets have to wash up and drink tea. One of the ideas is actually about drinking tea.

Swan at National Arboretum

If you’ve ever followed my creative process you will have noticed that things change and I’m more of an artisan than an artist. I don’t really have a creative process, despite what I just wrote. In three months it’s quite likely that the reflections on drinking tea will have become a poem about eating sandwiches. That’s how it goes. That’s how my poem about two swans flying by became a poem about sixteen swans swimming, and was eventually accepted and published as a poem about a cormorant.

If a poet’s studio is a serene place of beauty where words flow and great thoughts are written in flowing calligraphy, mine is more like a backstreet workshop where power tools scream and where things are bolted together roughly and beaten into shape with hammers.

Eventually I will rewrite the one about the two swans flying by.  I liiked it and it contained an idea that didn’t work with cormorants.

Guess what the theme of today’s photos is . . .

 

Ideas

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I’ve been thinking of ideas today.

It all started when I was thinking about committee meetings this morning. In a career spanning several different clubs and societies I have always taken the view that I will volunteer within reason, and I will go on committees if I think I can contribute. The “within reason” is important as people will work you to death if you let them, whilst offering little apart from encouragement.

We once had someone tell us, when we were forming a Management Committee at the Ecocentre, “I see my strength as having ideas. If you want any I have hundreds, just ask id you want one.”

I looked at Julia. Julia looked at me. neither of us rolled our eyes, but we both knew what the other was thinking. That woman was the first to leap into volunteering when TV crew came out to film our activities, using my recipe and system for running a pizza making session with kids. It didn’t worry me, because i have a face for radio, but it did amuse me, particularly when they got it wrong.

They used the wrong sort of pen for writing the names of the kids on the greaseproof paper by the side of their pizzas (this avoids arguments when kids lay claim to the best looking pizza rather than the monstrosity they actually produced). Use the wrong sort of pen and the cooking process makes it fade away  . . .

Yes, I allowed myself a little smile.

Some people see ideas as the gold standard in terms of contributions to committees.They are generally people who didn’t hve to produce results in whatever career they have followed during their pampered lives.

Ideas are like poetry and dust – spectral, ephemeral and intangible. As I’ve said before, when talking about poetry, if an editor rejects a poem he is only rejecting a jumble of words. I can easily rearrange them, or pluck a whole new batch from the interior of my head.

When doing writing exercises I often write down 100 ideas for poems. I then cross out 20 because they are almost the same as others on the list, then another 20 I don’t like. I have never, ever, written the other 60 because by the time I’ve done ten or a dozen I have new ideas that seem better than the old ones. Even the ones I do finish are often discarded until I have just one or two left.

Ideas are disposable.

The real gold standard is the volunteer who wants to do something. It doesn’t actually need to be much, because ten volunteers doing a little bit can shift a lot of work. One volunteer trying to do it all is just a breakdown waiting to happen.

If you want to see what volunteers can do when everyone works at an idea look at this link. It’s a big ambitious project, and it’s been accomplished by quiet volunteers who, unlike some well known TV naturalists, do it for the environment rather than personal glory. Even so, it takes a lot of volunteers to do things in order to bring an idea to life. Look here for an example.

More Work, Less Play

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Finally I seem to be getting back in the groove and, for once, actually have things written in advance. Although I had enough for three submissions last night, it still took me the best part of two hours to send them off. Each magazine wants a different format, and even though they want the same information, they want it in different forms and in one case, are very keen that you do it in a very specific order. By the time I’d finished sorting all that out, I then noticed some ways to “improve” the poems one last time. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Anyway, it’s done. I’m planning on making six submissions this month. I’d better get a move on, because one of them closes on 25th and i haven’t started writing it yet. Out of the six, three are to places where I submit regularly. Two are to places I submit to irregularly (I’ve been giving them a miss recently, during my dry spell) and one is to a magazine that has never accepted anything from me, and where I haven’t submitted for about three years.

This is getting back to the old days when it was all about the submissions, and I had plenty of material to send. Recently, with less to send I’ve been playing safe and only submitting to the easy ones. This change of attitude is, I think, the last thing I needed to do to get back to the old way of doing things. All I need now is plenty of ideas. That’s another area where I’ve been struggling but it seems that as my writing is picking up pace, so is the generation of ideas. I have read articles that claim you get more ideas if you write more and so far it seems to be the case.

Of course, I’m a narcissist and I write to see my name in print, so the real test will be to see if I increase my acceptances, not just my workload.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Followed by Even Less Activity

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Last night, as I eventually drifted off to sleep after a day where nothing much happened, a brilliant idea for a post came to me. It really very good, and it justifies some research and a couple of well chosen category tags. This is the one, I feel sure is going to attract attention and make me rich and famous.

Just one snag. When I woke up this morning that was all I could remember. The actual subject and the brilliant opening sentence have all gone. This, as you may recall from previous posts, is typical of how it happens. I’m not, however, downhearted, as I have learnt to accept this as a fact of my writing life. Some of it may come back, but if not, something else will drift along to replace it.

The famous writer’s notebook? It was on the landing where I left it after coming upstairs. Not that it mattered as I can rarely read my nocturnal scribble anyway.

In my defence, it was very busy in my head last night and, like the famously overly full shelf, something must have fallen off the end.

I’ve been looking at the availability of short online courses. You may remember that I did a few several years ago. I got bogged down in one of them, and that was enough to stall my enthusiasm. It sounds pathetic, but sometimes that’s all it takes.It was, I see, February 2021, and the course was Exploring the English Language. It all got  little complicated, as I wasn’t taught formal grammar at school, and I ground to a halt.

I may go back to it, but I’m signed up for some Roman History at the moment, starting when I finish this post. If it goes OK I will look at doing further courses, even paying for them.

The ones I’m currently doing are Open University free courses.

The ones I’m looking at for later are Oxford University short courses. These are the distance learning ones where you have no specific study times and no live conversations.

None of it will lead anywhere, but as I’m 65 and have no long-term career goals, apart from living long enough to draw my pension, this will suit me.

My Orange Parker Pen

Stuck for a Subject

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I’m stuck for subjects to write about tonight. I had a head crammed full of subjects last night, but fell asleep in front of TV, When I woke up I was cold and stiff and in no mood for writing, so I crawled up to bed. Twenty four hours later they don’t seem as interesting.

We have had quite a lot of magpies this year and they seem to be more playful than usual, though I’m not sure that this is a scientific observation, as being playful through the whole year doesn’t seem li9ke it would have much survival value and I’m probably misreading their behaviour.

The Nigel Farage story continues to develop. His bank, which turns out to be Coutts, claims that it closed his account as he no longer had enough money to meet their parameters, and offered him n account with another bank in the group. Other customers with Coutts claim they have less than the required wealth and have been allowed to keep their accounts. The story becomes more murky as the days go on.

I was interested to notice that the bank was fined for failing in its duties to check for money-laundering in 2012. They have, I’m sure, tightened things up, but it is interesting to see that until quite recently major banks have been allowing large depositors to get away without the same checks I had to go through a couple of months ago.

I am tempted to move on to the evils of modern banking for a few paragraphs but I’ll not subject you to that. Time to move on and look for some new subjects. Anyway, it’s time for bed.

Magpie

So Much to Do

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Now that the ideas are coming, I can’t stop them. Unfortunately I can’ remember them either, so I’m not making he best use of them. This morning I had three ideas coming downstairs. Only one of them was useful. The other two were about gravity and accidental death in the home, but I often think of them whilst making my way downstairs. The other was forgotten before I set foot on solid ground. I know it was a good idea, because I distinctly remember thinking “That’s a good idea.” as I came downstairs. And “I must remember that.” But I didn’t.

It’s the Numismatic Society Auction on Monday night – not the best time for it, being Bank Holiday Monday, but we will have to see.. I have to sort out what I’m bidding on. Fortunately I don’t collect coins so there aren’t many lots to interest me. This could be the recipe for a cheap but exciting night out – all the anticipation of an auction followed by a night buying a few cheap lots. Or even buying nothing . . .

Watch this space.

It’s been a cold day again. The weather is very changeable at the moment -one day Spring then a  day or two of Winter. I can put up with the cold (I’m wearing a blanket like a shawl as I type) but the disappointment is harder to bear. A day of daffodils and blue skies followed by a couple of cold days with grey skies and a sprinkle of cold rain is depressing.

Meanwhile, I’ve actually done a little tidying. I won’t be hanging out any flags just yet as it’s not made a noticeable difference. However, if I do  bit each day (as I often say when making excuses for lack of results) the results will eventually become significant.

I’m now going to make a list of things to do this evening and tomorrow in the hope that I might get something done before I go to the auction. (I’m not neglecting Julia, by the way, I asked if she’d like to go out for a romantic evening tomorrow (coin society auction followed by pizza on the way home) but she said she’d rather stay at home and watch her courgette seedlings grow.

 

 

Composing, Cliches and Searching for Subjects

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I’m back at work and being creative. If you can call poetry “work” and if you can call my work “creative”. mainly I just feed off the work of other people and potter about in the middle of a shared cloud of words.

Spring is coming, flowers are coming out and trees are gently unfolding their blossom. It is a time of cliche for all writers of Japanese style poetry. That blossom will blow across grass and wet tarmac, will be picked up on shoes, will be trodden into oblivion and will fall into bad company as all the cliches come out to play. I can’t help it. I have a limited number of experiences to draw on, being a non-mobile urban poet.

Litter, discarded shoes and magpies make up a lot of my world. Delivery vans, memories and ragged gardens all play their part. I should probably go back to sitting in car parks and watching people pass by.

In an effort to return to previous times I have returned to composing on paper and copying to the computer. It’s a shame because I was just getting used to composing on the screen. However, needs must, and if the price of writing more is that I have to do more copy typing, that is the price I will pay. At the moment I don’t have much choice.

Last month was the first one in years where I submitted nothing and that clearly can’t go on. To write well, you have to start by writing something. Similarly, if you want ideas, you have to start writing, as it’s well established that the more ideas you use, the more you will have. I suppose that they will eventually dry up, but that’s a mawkish reflection for another day.

(Sorry, wrote this yesterday and went to bed before posting – more to follow today.)

The Ideas Factory

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In past times when I had an idea I would keep it and wait for the right time to use it. I didn’t have many, and there never seemed to be a good time to use them.

Then I made a discovery, there is no limit on ideas, I noticed this years ago, when I sat down and listed ideas of subjects for poetry. I had a list of over 90 ideas. Some worked, some didn’t. But the important thing was that I never managed to work my way through the list, demonstrating that I was capable of generating more ideas than I could handle.

It’s always tempting to mention a meeting I was once in when someone

Ideas, the more you have, the more you get. made the statement “I always see my main strength as having ideas, rather than carrying them out, so if you need ideas feel free to ask.”

Those of you who have been on organising committees will have met the sort. Long on ideas, short on industry. To be fair, she was being modest – self-publicity was her main talent, having ideas was a secondary. We never, of course, needed to ask her for a single idea, as we always had too many.

Oh, I seem to have written two paragraphs about the meeting. It must still be annoying me.

The post can now go one of two ways. It could become a rant about committees. idleness, etc. Or it could remain on course as a discussion on generating ideas.  It’s supposed to be about ideas, so despite the fun element of vituperation, I will stick to the original intention.

Ideas – the more you have, the more you get. I’m just noticing, 12 months after my original (non-COVID) illness, that I am getting back to normal as writing and ideas are starting to take shape once more. It’s been a long time. I actually had to write a lot of notes this morning, as ideas started as soon as I woke up.

I see from the news that fish and chips are under threat – prices are up due to the war and disposable income is down. It’s like the Butterfly in the Amazon effect isn’t it – a dictator flexes his muscles in the East and the UK’s national dish is threatened.

Haddock Special at the Fishpan, Scarborough