Creativity doesn’t work the way most people think it works.
Ideas don’t come out of nothing. New ideas grow from existing ideas.
No idea is truly original. People often cite the likely apocryphal story of Sir Isaac Newton getting bonked on the head by a falling apple and causing him to “discover” gravity as an example of creative inspiration. The fact is, Newton couldn’t have come up with the “law of universal gravitation” without all of the previous knowledge, experiences, and ideas he gained prior to that.
Think of each idea as a building block for future ideas. Suppose you have three ideas: A, B, and C… A+B=D… A+C=E… A+B+D=F… The three ideas can spawn three more ideas.
But that’s not all… you can also take new ideas and double down on them again with old concepts… A+D=G… A+E=H… A+F=I… B+D=J… B+E=K… B+F=L… C+D=M… C+E=N… C+F=O… the three new ideas combined once again with old ideas can spawn nine more ideas.
Ideation works like an infinite snowflake fractal, with each new idea spawning the potential for exponentially more possibilities. What might have started as a small handful of ideas by our ancient primate ancestors for how to more efficiently gather food and stay safe evolved exponentially into all the innovation and creativity we see around us today. Billions of creative people with quintillions of ideas… and still continuing to generate more and more ideas.
As you can see, it takes old ideas to create new ideas.
Here is another idea: We can compile lists of old ideas, randomly pick from the lists, and present them to people to help them come up with new ideas.
How can this concept help us fiction writers with our creativity? We can have a computer randomly pick two concepts for us, then we use our brains to brainstorm new ideas for our stories:
- Genre: “horror” + “science fiction” = “Frankenstein“
- Character personalities: “courageous” + “loyal” = “Harry Potter”
- Setting and conflict: “a family home” + “getting caught in a lie” = “Mrs. Doubtfire“
- Genre and trope: “fantasy” + “Hero’s Journey” = “The Lord of the Rings“
- Genre and trope: “paranormal” + “Hero’s Journey” = “The Sixth Sense“
As you can see, there is a lot of room for interpretation and creativity, even though the random selection of elements is largely mechanical. The point is to marry two random story elements together and see what your brain comes up with. This can be a very powerful creativity tool.
One crude way you can implement this idea in your own brainstorming today is to use Wikipedia’s “random article” feature (that is, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random ). Simply read two random articles, then brainstorm a story that combines elements of both articles.
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