There often seems to be a common misconception about how the great ideas in the world have/will come about: that one day you’ll be sitting under a tree and suddenly inspiration will strike! Be it from an apple falling on your head or an idea planted directly into your mind from a mysterious muse, the great ideas are something magical and out of your control. While this notion might lead to great anecdotes like, “that one time when I was mowing the lawn” it generally doesn’t describe how most of the world’s great ideas have been transformed into great accomplishments.
A perfect example of this is Thomas Edison, possibly the world’s greatest idea “machine”, an inventor with over 1,000 patents to his name. Only a few of those, however, are what people may consider great. The phonograph, the light bulb, and the predecessor of our modern movie projectors are certainly great inventions. The other 997? Maybe not so great, but they were still ideas that Edison put out there, trying to latch onto those few great ones, to snatch them up from the ether.
Gary Winogrand, the famed street photographer, left over 10,000 rolls of undeveloped film in his estate at the time of his passing. He said his own key to success was that he would take photographs, maybe photographs that not even he wanted to see, but he would take them anyway. He would develop them, look at them all, and through all the muddled shots and uninteresting garbage sprang one or two photographs that he prized–one or two out of hundreds.
When your student is stuck, trying to come up with something to about which to write, have him/her grab a pencil and a piece of paper. Write out 15 or 20 ideas on the subject at hand, even ideas that would seem ridiculous or farfetched or bizarre. Have him/her look at each one, think about them, and write out more ideas. Save them, put them aside, think some more, and come back to the list. Maybe something will jump out at the him/her, maybe not, but for each idea that is written down there is one more chance that it will be a great one.
The great ideas almost never arrive through happenstance or luck, but through perseverance and a whole mess of really, really bad ideas that you just needed to get out of the way.
