TECH: Where do you get your ideas? (3)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting 27 Dec 2010

And while I'm cleaning up the scraps of paper from my desk, there's one more in this collection. It says:

Neil Gaiman
"The ideas aren't the hard bit. ..."
You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions.
What if ...
If only ...
I wonder ...
If this goes on ...
Wouldn't it be interesting if ...

"An idea doesn't have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating."
Juxtaposition -- two or more together
ideas + make things up convincingly and interestingly and new

And Dr. Google shows that this is based on an article over here

http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/Where_do_you_get_your_ideas%3F

"The Ideas aren't the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new."

So get the ideas. But then spin some characters, a setting, a plot, and write!

"You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if...?"

And once you have some what if ideas, how do you get a plot?

"An idea doesn't have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating. Plots often generate themselves when one begins to ask oneself questions about whatever the starting point is."

Bang some ideas together and see what happens!

Go ahead and read Neil Gaiman's posting. Then let the ideas flow.

What if? If only? I wonder? If this goes on? Wouldn't it be interesting if?

And pick one or two out of that flow, then put them together with characters in conflict in a scene, and wrap the words around your vision so that we can all see what you are showing us.

Write!

FILL: You can't teach passion?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting 27 Dec 2010

Hum...

Over here http://www.sfnovelists.com/2010/12/23/you-cant-teach-passion/, David B. Coe blogged about "You Can't Teach Passion." And...

For some reason, the title, "You Can't Teach Passion," kind of itched whenever I saw it. So I've been thinking about why that feels like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

I think I can probably agree with David that we can't teach passion, if we're talking about teaching as "sage on the stage" lecture presentations designed to fill time with the teacher talking and the students scribbling, sleeping, or staring into space, but probably not really engaged. Unfortunately, too many of us have learned to define teaching and learning in those terms.

On the other hand, that kind of teaching often does a very good job of eliminating passion. Even someone who has a dream, a vision, a fire burning often finds that kind of teaching acting as a tremendously effective dream quencher, blackout curtain, and fire extinguisher. Take a kid who's lively, outgoing, interested in the world around them, set them down in a orderly classroom with good teaching discipline, and pretty soon you're likely to have a quiet drone.

But, despite the excellent methods of eliminating passion that we have developed (documented at length as killer phrases in What a Great Idea! 2.0 by Chic Thompson -- that's nonsense, that's irrelevant, that's unproven, that's dangerous, that's not salable, etc. etc. etc. all of which say "No" to passion), we've also got some ways to encourage passion. See Michalko's Thinkertoys, Roger van Oech's A Whack on the Back of the Head and A Kick In the Seat of the Pants, or Edward de Bono's various books, among others. Ways to take that little flicker of interest and excitement, to blow gently on it and provide tinder to help it grow into a raging flame. To give passion creative outlets and let the dream become reality.

You can't teach passion. But you can quench it, so easily. And, on the gripping hand, you can encourage passion. Heck, you might even find a teacher cheering you on. And that's real learning.

(Who is still trying to figure out why the notion that some people don't have "the passion" or "the inspiration" or whatever it is makes me queasy. What do you think?)