If there’s one question that writers mock people for asking them, it’s this one:  “Where do you get your ideas?” I don’t know why that’s seemingly so insulting. Maybe it’s because some people think it comes from the hoi polloi, and therefore merits only a sneer. (The equivalent question to actors from audience members would therefore be:  “How do you remember all those lines?” I’ve stood next to some  well-known actors while my sister has asked them that. Their derision was palpable.) I’m willing to answer almost any sort of question at any time (unlike at least one far far far far far far far far better known writer). Maybe it’s because I’m less clever (certainly) or less stuck-up, or some combination of both. I think that David Lindsay-Abaire, a contemporary playwright of unequaled skill who retains the good grace to be polite, a Pulitzer-prize-winning writer with the temerity to self-assign Barney Rubble to serve as his Facebook icon and who has the self-confidence to publicly admit that he watched “Lost” and didn’t understand the ending, should serve as our role model:  be kind, be thoughtful, be respectful, be funny, don’t be a jackass. I imagine it’s that much harder when you’re a Pulitzer prizewinner, or, as in the other case linked to above, when your ascension to fame is catapulted by your public  repudiation of self-made billionaire book lovers with the audacity to proclaim their love of reading and for your work specifically on fantastically popular talk shows they host (and own). The rest of us, with scattered publications or play productions every year that may or may not add up to a “career,” have no cause to be haughty.

Why bring this up now? Because this morning it occurs to me for the first time in my life that I actually get two sorts of creative ideas. Where I used to believe that “ideas just come to me,” I now see that that answer applies to only some of my ideas. The other ideas are actively dredged for. In other words, while some ideas land on me like bees collecting pollen, for the others, I have to don clamming boots and wade out in the muck treading gingerly until I feel something worth picking up.

Before I get further into this, a little background. My entire life, I’ve had twin pursuits:  business and art.

At age 11, I was selling collectible comic-books through the mail. A few years ago I bought up some back issues of the only “professional” fan magazine I knew of at the time, the Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector (later shortened to “RBCC,” as its scope broadened), so that I could check out the hand-typed and stenciled ads I placed as a prepubescent and cringe. I bought and sold comic books professionally for about eight years. For some years, I ran a healthy mail-order business with a business partner I later acquired (my father was my first, silent, business partner); we also displayed our wares at innumerable comic-book conventions, often three times a month, and sometimes simultaneously in separate cities. What stopped this activity? 1. It was “time” to open a store, and neither of us wanted to run a store. 2. He was expected to take over operating his family business. 3. I wanted more time for sex and drinking. So we liquidated. I sometimes think back to the inventory we had — first issues of all the major Marvel comic-books, plus the first appearance of the Justice League of America, plus countless other key books, in high grade — and think of the secluded Pacific resort we could buy with it now.

Also at age 11, I started mailing my short stories off to magazines. I learned how to type at age 11, and for my birthday that year, my father bought me an IBM Selectric II. For many of us, there was life before the IBM Selectric II, and there’s been life after it. While calligraphy was the most important thing that Steve Jobs ever learned, typing was it for me. My handwriting is miserable — exacerbated by skipping the grade that taught penmanship; working as a reporter for some years without knowing shorthand; and too many lecture notes taken during college — and to this day I don’t like to hand-write things, partially because later on even I have difficulty reading them. But typing! I can work a keyboard all day and all night, generating words only a fraction of an instant less quickly than I can think of them. Some years ago my eldest brother told me that he thought in terms of mathematical formulae. I understood immediately, because whenever I’m working with the language I’m seeing it in my head as transmuted from a QWERTY keyboard. Whatever those other people are doing with their Moleskin journals and their fancy pens, I’ve been doing for 37 years on a keyboard. Initially, that keyboard was part of an IBM Selectric II, but since then it’s been part of a variety of computers, all of them powered, fittingly, by the OS conceived by Mr. Jobs’ company Apple. And for those 37 years, beginning even before the first sprout of puberty, I’ve been writing stories and sending them off. Initially, my targets were genre fiction outlets like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and my professional habits were every bit as clueless as one would expect those of an 11-year-old to be. While I learned from their submission guidelines that a SASE was required, and was able to parse out that a SASE was a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope, invariably at the beginning the SASE I sent was a half-size envelope with a single first-class stamp on it, not large enough or with enough franking to return the submission. In retrospect, both from the quality of the prose and the format of the submission, it’s obvious that a boy was mailing these pieces off, and the odds of a boy cracking literary marketplaces that adults were struggling to enter, were nil. With that in mind, I have never forgotten the kindness shown to me by some anonymous female secretary who added these words in her own loving hand to a form rejection letter:  “But thank you.” No, thank you, because that kept me going for years.

And so, in one way or another, my life has followed this course ever since:  running a business, and plying an art. I did not grow up thinking I would own a marketing agency, and I did not plan to become a playwright. For quite a while I thought I would be a reporter who wrote novels. There were only two problems with this:  I didn’t like being a reporter, and I have no talent for writing novels. I had one great scoop as a reporter, something about a toxic waste coverup, and even during that interview I kept recasting the source as a character in a story, and rewriting the dialogue. (And the fact that I can’t remember more about this story — my one great scoop — tells you all you need to know. I could add that because I was so headstrong I didn’t like reporting to editors, and when I became an editor, I didn’t like the way the reporters didn’t like reporting to me, that news journalism and I were not made for each other.) As for novels… they just seemed too long. It took forever to write one! I wrote, I think, three — all in various phases of completion — or maybe it was four. I can remember parts of two of them, and got one well near completion when I was 14 or so, but I was bursting with new discoveries and things I wanted to write about, and it was constantly problematic that these new ideas wouldn’t fit into whatever novel I was already writing. This explains why the almost-completed one has probably six dozen main characters and just as many storylines, one of them concerning a king who has barricaded himself into his bathroom — or “throne room,” get it? — and escapes down the toilet. But plays! Here’s what I discovered:  that sometimes I could write a full-length play in two weeks, and that sometimes I could write a short play in a day, or half a day, or, sometimes, even under an hour! Long before the BlackBerry, and then the iPhone, turned us all into people with Attention Deficit Disorder, I had discovered my medium. And best of all, once I developed a circle of actors and directors, I didn’t have to grind through months or years of mail submissions to see something in print — now I could assemble people and hear it read within a day, if not later that very same day! This was the sort of production timeline that appealed to me, even moreso than the newspaper story that would appear in a day or two. Is it any wonder that I’ve written dozens of plays, but haven’t finished one novel?

I  know where my lifelong interest in writing comes from. The house I grew up in was stuffed with books, some of them left over by older siblings long gone whom I didn’t grow up with. Those siblings also left behind a handful of comic books, including one issue each of The Avengers, Tales to Astonish, and Tales of the Unexpected. (That first item was a first issue (!); the second featured Giant-Man and the Wasp versus The Human Top; the last featured Space Ranger. Given that I last saw these comics almost four decades ago and can remember that, far moreso than the biggest news story I reported, might lead one to the conclusion that they were somewhat important to me.) For the first 10 years, growing up in a house fronted by a highway and girded by deep forest, these and comic books were my only companions. Many of the books, as well as the comics, were set in either Manhattan or outer space; to me, in one way or another, they offered clues to avenues of escape.

I also know where my lifelong interest in business comes from. My father worked for himself, in a company founded by he and his father. My grandfather worked for himself. My great-grandfather worked for himself. My brother worked for himself. My brother-in-law, when he arrived on the scene, worked for himself. It seemed to be what we did. And, in the classic sense of entrepreneurs in history, they all had more than one business. My father’s successful contracting business built roads and bridges, and schools, and gas stations. But that wasn’t enough for him, so he built a car wash and ran that too. My brother started out selling cars on someone else’s lot, decided he could make more money selling cars on his own lot, then started offering repair services to the new owners of those cars, then decided there was even more money to be made selling the parts needed to fix those cars, all of which led him to be the automotive parts importer he is today, with 60-some employees, and warehouses and stores in three states. I don’t know how many interconnected businesses my brother-in-law has, but I can say that when I saw him last week he was knee-deep in three different projects. I come from a line of industrious people; rightly or wrongly, just writing stories and sending them off was never going to be enough.

So here I am, at this stage of my life, 30 to 40 years after these seminal moments, and the duality of my career, a duality that I hope is interwoven to provide a stronger fabric, continues:  art and business. And this morning I realized that I get my ideas in two different ways, because they are two different sorts of ideas. The ideas for my plays just come to me. No one needs them, and so, they alight. The ideas for  client projects are demanded by necessity, and those, I have to go get. In some ways, those are harder, and therefore sweeter when caught.

On Friday I came home from my office utterly wrung out.  I’d been traveling frequently, and my body wasn’t sure what time zone it was in or what was expected of it at the moment. Getting just three hours’ sleep on Tuesday morning because of flight delays, and then having to fight traffic down to Long Beach for a conference and a meeting, and then returning Wednesday through Friday to a staggering amount of work, all contributed. So when I got home on Friday and discovered my kids ensconced in Halo: Reach on the xBox, I lay down for a brief nap and then it came to me:  a strange line of dialogue skittered across my brain, followed by another, then another, until I had four lines of dialogue, and then a stage image, and then, suddenly, I knew I had a new short play, and there, just as quickly, came its title. I knew the characters, and the two voices that each would have, and the lighting, and the opening, and the two stories that two of them would tell, and the opening sound effect, and I even had a tenuous grasp on the ending. None of this was unusual. I’ve written about it here before: Usually, the play just comes. The less thinking about it, the better.

Creative work for an agency is different, though. Those ideas have to fit certain parameters, whether the client is in the public sphere (government, or non-profit, or a political campaign, where the measurement of success is either in changing people’s actions or in winning) or in the private (where the usual gauge is sales). Now the ideas have to be clever — one hopes! — and doable. And they have to result in something. And they have to meet with client approval. Granted, there is some similarity with the theatre, where you have to be able accomplish your idea on stage, and you work to result in a certain response from the audience, and you’re looking for approval from, well, someone. (Audiences, or critics, or theatre makers, or yourself, or others you know personally. Arthur Miller said he wrote all his plays for his father, even long after his father was dead.)

Both kinds of ideas are creative. I do a lot of writing and directing — but some of it is for the theatre, and some of it is for clients. (And guess which pays better.) I get enormous satisfaction from the successful execution of an idea in either arena. It’s a wonderful feeling sitting in the house for the production of one of your plays on a night when it’s working — when the audience laughs where they’re supposed to, or seems somehow emotionally caught up just in the way you’d hoped and worked for. But the other work I do is no less important, although it sometimes feels less respected by the creative community. I would submit that this sort of work is just as important, because it generates tremendous impact in people’s lives. (Just as we hope that the arts do.)  It’s difficult to describe how good it feels when your insight, your idea, your understanding of someone’s problem or need, is transmuted into the creative impulse that manifests a result. Many of our clients are educational institutions, or environmental initiatives, or non-profits helping people deal with very real challenges such as autism. Others are small-to-medium-sized businesses like those owned by my family. You can see why I take my work for them very seriously:  It’s important. And why those ideas have to be gone and gotten:  because, in some ways, more is at stake.

So now, after more than 20 years of people asking me off and on where I get my ideas from, I have a new answer:  What kind of idea?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 10th, 2010 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Playwriting, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.