On having more interesting ideas

CY TWOMBLY’S STUDIO IN ROME, 1966

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A hobby of mine is to answer random questions that people email me, and I figured I should publish some of the answers here so I don’t have to repeat myself. If you have a question, you can use this Google form and I’ll publish an answer from time to time.

Here’s one. A reader asked me how I go about finding interesting things to write about. I am not sure how good I am at being interesting, but I do spend a lot of time coming up with ideas—both for essays and for other contexts—and I am much better at it than I used to be. So:

1. It is a muscle. Every day for maybe 7 years, I’ve written about what I think in detail, and the more I’ve done it, the better I’ve gotten at articulating what is new and interesting and meaningful in my thoughts. There is a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde: “To write well all you need to do is develop your mind. If you have thought deeply, nearly everything looks interesting.” And it really is a lot like that. When I talk to people who have worked with their ideas seriously for 10+ years, it feels like I can throw any topic on them and they’ll have an interesting idea, or if not an idea so at least an unexpected way of approaching it.

2. I get ideas in communion with others—by reading and by talking, and by thinking about what I read and talk about. If you look at people who have been fountains of ideas they often had a dinner crew of witty people they met every day and whom they would try to entertain with interesting observations.¹ I don’t do that, but I email a lot. There can be a positive feedback loop here: the more interesting ideas you have and make public, the more interesting people you attract, and they provide you with more ideas, etc.

3. You can also get into this feedback loop by chasing your reading. You read and reflect on what you learn. Then you use those reflections to find even more interesting nooks in the history of literature, spurring more and more ideas. If you don’t have access to interesting peers, you might feel like you are missing out. But books are the main peer group of any thinker.

4. The opposite of communion is also useful to me. When I am with others, when I read books, when I look at Twitter—I feel like a dam filling with water, with potential energy. But it is usually not until I spend a long time alone in my head that it turns into kinetic energy. My best writing happened after I, at the end of 2021, got so sick that I couldn’t move or talk or read for three weeks. It was like I melted away, all my thoughts sunk, I forgot who I was, and when I could get out of bed I wrote “Looking for Alice.” The best ideas tend to be fragile and can’t stand the scrutiny of others until they’ve learned to walk. Johanna and I wrote a long piece about the relationship between solitude and having good ideas here.

5. For me, the core thing driving my thoughts is trying to get better at the things that matter to me—being a better father, husband, friend, writer, etc. You just have to grab hold of what awakens a sense of loving curiosity in you. If you pursue those things, they never cease to open up to new questions and observations and ideas. The richer your understanding of “the landscape” gets, so to speak, the more paths onward you spot.

6. I have more exciting ideas when I don’t feel shame about what excites me, when I allow myself to be stupid and naive and boring. I try not to judge myself in the act of giving birth to ideas.²

7. If we think of the space where unborn ideas live as a landscape, we need some map to navigate it. Your curiosity is one such map. Thinking about what others might find interesting is another. Your curiosity is the more fine-grained map of the two. And you need a fine-grained map to navigate these murky regions.

1. In 2021, six months before I started Escaping Flatland I began taking detailed notes from my conversations. In particular, I did this with my friend Torbjörn, whom I would call every week to discuss ideas as I walked through the nature reserve next to our house. We have known each other since we were 13, but it was remarkable how much untapped potential we had in our conversation—and how much better our ideas got when I wrote them down. Instead of drifting off to random topics each time, we could return to the most interesting idea from the last call and go deeper. I have written about this in much more detail here.

2. However, I do judge later, and put at least 90 percent of the ideas in the garbage can when I reread it.