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Bag Of Curious Things

A couple of days ago, I cleared out my desk (partly out of want of something to do) and it all looks much tidier now. I have no doubt that it will go back to its bad habits within a couple of months.

I came across a few notebooks. I’m in the habit of jotting down all my ideas, half-ideas and non-ideas. I picked up this habit a few years ago in the lame fear of losing some precious modicum of creative insight (it doesn’t really happen, but there is that paranoia there). Sometimes there are huge descriptions of things that seemed so simple in my imagination but so long in the form of text. Other times, there are very ugly drawings or haphazard attempts at mind maps (which, incidentally, have never worked for me, though I still try them). And most of the time, I get lines and lines of fragments. These are mostly in bad handwriting, and happen to me whenever I just feel compelled to put something together. On occasion, I’ve looked back at these fragments failing to recall what I had actually meant.

In any case, I found it most interesting that there’s a surprisingly large fraction of ideas emerging from… well, I don’t know the word for it. Errors, maybe? Misheard lyrics; quotations (deliberately or not) taken out of context; isolated titles of things that I’d never watched, read or heard (and in many cases, still haven’t); mistaken interpretations becoming puns; meaningless phrases; things imagined with the help of songs and yet not at all fitting their lyrics; books that I’d never read and merely tried to guess out of vague ideas gleaned from synopses and clues from their covers; the marrying of elements that have nothing to do with one another; and so on.

A bag of curious things, this. Somehow these things have inspired quite a number of my ideas. (Not always good ones, mind you, but that’s mostly better than nothing.)

It’s intriguing for me because in observing this, I also observe how it’s become less and less of an accident. Increasingly I deliberately pair jarring elements together to emerge with some chimerical invention. My willingness to play, to explore, to be whimsical also seems to have grown; I’m less reluctant to take things out of context and to consider them on completely imagined terms. I delight in misinterpretations because they always lead to other new things.

Maybe it’s part of some subconscious work process. It has after all been pretty successful, so I might have somehow internalised it.

Brr. Then I imagine all the other writers in the world and start wondering about all the strange, strange work processes that there might be out there.

But, you know, whatever works.

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© 2009 a modest odyssey.