Idea Monkey

When some jamook asks me this one (thereby revealing him/herself to be a person who has about as much imaginative muscle as a head of lettuce), I always smile prettily and answer, "Schenectady."

And when the jamook looks at me quizzically, and scratches head with hairy hand, I add: "Oh, sure. There's a swell Idea Service in Schenectady; and every week I send 'em twenty-five bucks; and every week they send me a fresh six-pack of ideas."

                                                                             Harlan Ellison, regarding the question

Every writer gets asked the question.  Even the least of us, even those of us who are still being paid pennies per word and publishing in the smallest of the small presses, the micro-presses, hell, the nano-presses.   Every writer gets asked the question.

"Where do you get your ideas?"  

I do not hold to the notion that there are no dumb questions.   That idea is borne out of some bogus, squishy touchy feely concept that everyone is equal and no one is better or smarter or faster than anyone else, and therefore every question is a good one.  Please believe me, it ain't so.   And the asker of the question is almost invariably someone who wishes they were a writer, but has no prayer of ever being a writer, because if you gotta ask the question then you sure as hell ain't ready for the answer, which is that ideas are far and away the least important component of any creative endeavor of any kind.   Ideas are a dime a dozen, they are common, they flitter about like a swarm of mayflies.   The idea doesn't matter, it's how you execute it, your strategies and tactics (sound familiar?), how well you capture the beating of the human heart that must be at the core of every story.   Writers, good honest writers, spend a lifetime learning the craft of turning workaday ideas into actual art, and it's damned hard, and frustrating, and the most interesting part of the craft, and what we most want to talk shop about.  (Or, as Chaucer put it, "The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne."  Chaucer did not have spellcheck.)

But no.  They want to hear where you get your ideas.

Okay.  I get mine from Idea Monkey.

Some writers, they got a muse.  I got a monkey.    He lives in a little cage in the center of my disordered mind, and when he gets riled up, he hops around and screeches and throws stuff out of the cage, like zoo monkeys throw their poop.  (Hey, Craig, great metaphor for your work!)((Yeah, shut up.))

Idea Monkey doesn't keep a schedule.   Idea monkey throws ideas at me in the shower, in the car, at work, in class (I probably shouldn't admit that one), when I should be attending to a loved one.   Idea monkey is insistent; he wails and hoots and shrieks and will not be ignored.  Sometime he starts up in my dreams, sometimes he interrupts me in the middle of a movie, sometimes he drags me away from what I really ought to be working on.  In short, he's a pain in the ass.

And are they even good ideas?  Mostly they are not.  "Hey!  Hey!  How about a vampire with dentures?"  Really, Idea Monkey?  "I know!  I know!  Truman Capote was secretly an assassin on the payroll of the CIA!"  Oh, Idea Monkey, that sucks.   "Fine!  Here's one: a haunted tacklebox!"  Idea Monkey, that's stupid.  "Wait!  You'll love this one!  This guy, his butt is an interdimensional gateway, and he takes this dump what never ends, and it's a living sh--" Idea Monkey!  Stop it!*  "One more!  One more!   These two guys want to kidnap Bob Stoops, except they get tangled up with a bunch of white supremacists and a guy with a stolen shark, plus also there's a former Soviet honeypot spy and a narcoleptic sheriff!"  Idea Monkey, that's . . .

That's . . .

A stolen shark, you say?

A narcoleptic sheriff?

Hang on there a second, Idea Monkey.  You might have something.









*You may think, as I did, that this is the worst idea ever.   In the the history of human ideas, positively the dumbest.   And I thought I could write it as satire.   Except.   Two months ago while playing around on Netflix to see what horror flicks I might watch for Halloween, I came across a film called MONSTURD.    I do not make this up.   Satire is dead, because reality outpaces it.