stealing well

I've had a post fermenting for ages about finding ideas and sources of inspiration.  Well, not exactly fermenting.  I'd written one sentence and then put it off.  The thought was about finding inspiration.  And I came to it from the overwhelmed feeling I get very often  when marvelling at the sheer volume of material out there to get through - the good and the bad.  It's reading neurosis.  And not just that, but ideas neurosis.  How do consistently prolific people get to be so consistently prolific?  How does this person always find the good stuff to read?  How do people know what to read and what to look for?

It was a terrible feeling as a student when it dawned on me that I needed to come up with my own 'new' ideas.  You know, proper ones.  That might be published.  I nearly asked for my money back.  After a semester of reading genuises, you're supposed to contribute something sensible.  And valid.  And if that wasn't enough, there's no way in a decade of Sundays you could cover all the material before starting to write.  But when the panic subsided the most helpful thought I had was that I was the only one reading this stuff the way I read it.  I was the only one making exactly the connections I was making.  Which is not to say my contribution was anything other than tiny and nothing if not insubstantial.  But it was original.  You find little holes in things to crawl through.  You piece things together that seem ridiculously abstract, refract them through your total experience, and build them into something bigger.  Which is fun.  Even though I've made it sound not fun.

Recently there's been a lot of uptake on Where Ideas Come From.  Which Scamp put to the test. I know I'm firmly in Faris' camp when I say that we shouldn't feel bad about stealing.  But I think I'm interested in what kind of thieves we need to be.  We need to steal well.

Richard talks about reading weird shit.  I couldn't agree more.  And I think the reason why, is because if you look at anything complex properly, absolutely anything, the rewards and parallels are massive.  Take music.   Counterpoint.  Polyphony.  Compression.  Take philosophy.  Different minds.  'Affective' communication.  Language in itself - and particularly specialist language from an alien discipline - often acts as a metaphor, or just as helpfully, a potential metaphor that falls down, for your area.

And that's why it's easy to wonder how people have enough time to go exploring weird stuff that's somehow informative for their primary interest.  It's because it doesn't matter they're reading, it matters that they're reading it right.  Zadie Smith wrote an interesting thing recently with an idea about ideal readers: how the task of the reader, if it's done right, is equal to that of the writer, in stature.

So I suppose what I find interesting is, yes we steal, but what kind of person does it take to steal well?  The kind of person who as long as their material's rich, will get something good from it.  As a headhunter I wanted a swear box in the office for the phrase Big Ideas People.  Or just to start hitting people every time I heard it.  It gave me this mental image of dangerously overweight people with ideas coming out of their orifices. (I'm weird like that).  If what I'm on about is right, it's not ideas people we're after.  (It might be partly, but that's not the half of it.)  Russell's talked in this marvellous interview about how rare it is to find creative geniuses in communications in the sense of eureka-yelling Da Vinci types. 

So I'm not sure what the words to call these people are.  Other than creative generalists, of course.  Appropriators, maybe.  Channellers, magpies, assimilators, refracters, strainers, fermenters, adventurers, kaleidoscopes.  Yes that's better.  We need Big Kaleidescope People.

Comments

[Will]

Some of the best posts come when you appropriate other people's work in your own way - such as my post on credo (well, I like it, anyway), which nicks your original premise.

Personally, I'm trying to write more, if only to get some of the more random thoughts out of my mind.

Any thoughts on Generation Y? (Gleefully stolen from www.theadnostic.com).

So yes, I'm with you.

Nick, half inch, chaff, give it the ol' five finger discount. Just so long as it helps..

[Ana (aliceinadland)]

Brilliant piece. I've followed several links to your blog in the past few weeks but never had time to go through it properly. Today I did and it's great. Will definitely be coming back.

[Northern Planner]

Big Kaleidoscope People, very good;-)
I think there's a big difference between plagiarism and being infuenced.
Reading is so important, I think the best ideas tend to come from creating new connection between things - the less obvious the better.

[Faris]

Lovely.

And exactly. Stealing in the post-modern sense that Elliot was probably on about is about being a cultural lens - you are the only lens that steals the exact mix of stuff you do and what you do with it is also a function of the specific mix of influences in your head.

One of the lovely things about writing a blog is that you are always reading / doing stuff in an active sense - looking to mash disparate things up and see where it takes you, to feed the blog.

Let's all get kaleidoscopes too. They're cool.

[BBC Brown]

children. look at the way children do things. best thiefs in the world. they don't copy, they steal; experiences, moves, words, colours, all sorts and come up with their own little spin. if you want to understand how creativity works either get children, or spend a morning a week in a playgroup.

grown ups copy. grown ups suck.

[beeker]

oh my god BBC Brown your actual video is on the BBC. you might be getting too famous for this blog. (didn't ben once go on radio 4? you can give him a run for his money now.)

[Will]

Link, Beeker?

[beeker]

to the bbc scoop on Scoop Brown? click on marcus' name and he's got one.

[Will]

Just seen it. Brilliant.

[BBC Brown]

I'm still Marcus from the block.