So in my travels this morning, I crossed paths with this article over at Indiewire about a professional conflict between Steven Spielberg and special effects master Rick Baker back in the early 1980s. It is an interesting story about never-before-seen photos of intricate alien creature sculptures that Baker designed for a dark Spielberg sci-fi film that never ended up being made. The long, weaving tale casts some light on Hollywood business dealings, professional mistrust and the various legal maneuvers behind some of the biggest films of that decade.
The part I found most fascinating, however, was the light it shed on the messy aspects of the creative process.
The truth was that many of the films that didn’t get made were just bad ideas. They didn’t make sense, or weren’t practical or affordable to make, or just couldn’t come together right. They were idea experiments and lines of inquiry that ultimately didn’t go anywhere.
The upshot of this particular story is that out of the wreckage of this doomed sci-fi film, another one was assembled from the salvaged rubble: “ET: The Extraterrestrial”.
In any creative project, the hardest part seems to be getting from a cold page to the point where the process reaches critical mass and starts to roll forward on its own. That’s the challenge of working with ideas for a living – it often means working with a lot of bad ideas. Bad ideas stall momentum. Like Frankenstein’s monster, they lie dead on the table, waiting on the errant lightning strike that changes everything. Good ideas are rare, finding them is hard, and making good use of them is even harder.
This Rick Baker article gives a glimpse at where most of the good ideas seem to live. They live in the depths, far below the shallow waters of the cheap and easy. Because you can’t get into those sparse and cold depths without first passing through the shallows, the good ideas have the space and time to grow. Good ideas are the evolutions of bad ideas, the larger and more dangerous predators in the conceptual food chain. And from time to time, they come up to feed.
Years ago, I often used the power of bad ideas to break through blocks when writing marketing copy. Faced with a tough deadline and lacking any good ideas, I’d stare at the blank screen and despair of ever finding a usable notion ever again. I would splash on the surface, churning water but not getting anywhere.
Finally, out of sheer frustration, I’d crank out a few hundred words of the most obscenity-laced ranting I could manage about my frustrations, anything that happened to be bothering me about life in general, and all the things I might like to say about the project but knew I couldn’t. The idea was to write the worst, most ineffective and offensive copy I could. A lot of it wouldn’t be accurate. Most didn’t reflect what I really believed or thought or would say if I wasn’t in a bad and sarcastic mood. It’d be a long tirade of awful awfulness.
But invariably, somewhere in that nasty mess, I’d manage to hit on a truth or two. A genuine emotion, a real idea. The good idea would swim up and start eating the bad ideas. I’d be surprised. Then I would cut everything else, rewrite the remains in much less colorful language, and I’d finally start getting somewhere on the project. It was always a desperation move, but it also always worked.
It is a dangerous writing strategy that I mostly stopped doing years ago, for two reasons. One, I needed it less. I learned to trust the process more and got better at punching through the cold page without that kind of trickery. More importantly, though, I realized that someday, I’d inadvertently email out the wrong draft to a client. It never happened, thankfully, but you never know what you’ll accidentally do with a bad idea on a difficult day.
That doesn’t mean we don’t produce bad ideas anymore. We do. We produce plenty of them. We just work harder to ensure that they don’t hit the streets until they’ve had a chance to get together and have kids. Success is the progeny of failure, and bad ideas often seem to have good taste in partners. We’re after their larger, healthier and more aggressive offspring. We’ve gotten better and wiser about fishing in the depths for the catch of the day. Failure gives success its taste.
Are you struggling to come up with good ideas today? Fighting a losing fight with the cold page?
Try coming up with some bad ones. As many as you can. Come up with them fast. Have fun with it. If you give them the freedom to be the bad ideas they are – and yourself the freedom to indulge in their stupidities – you might just be surprised at how often they will attract the hungry attention of the good ones.
And if all else fails, swear like a drunken sailor. Just be careful when and where you do it in public.
