All that is made within the world we live, and if you believe in intelligent design those parameters expand exponentially, began in the swirling realms of dreams and ideas. Games, movies, books and stories are all puffed up by a wisp-like subsistence of pure ideas, whereas the physical world is typically more beholden to ideas built upon other ideas. But at the end of it all, at the bottom of the turtle tower, it took that ingenious spark of realisation from one mind to start that ball rolling down the hill. Now, if we turn to the realms of philosophy than even that could be called in contention. Heck, Carl Yung might go so far as to prepose some sort of primordial shared consciousness- a metaphysical crucible within which clashes the errant desires and wayward conceptualisation of an intellectually warring society, and out of which is born that immaculate nugget of conception.
But I am a mite more practical. As, I assume are you, and thus when it comes to confronting the idea of... well, ideas- I seek to break things down to their most practical and build up to the finished product. That is how pretty much everything in development works when we bring it to movies, books or game creation. How else are we expected to share our ideas, afterall, if we cannot figure out how to convey them to others. And sharing ideas is the only way we can make sure the big and grandiose conceptuals have any chance to one-day exist. Communication has never quite been one of my own personal strong points, which is what brings me to this little impromptu refresher course today. Well, that and I have something of a guide to work through.
In the words of an artist, the drawing kind, it all starts with a rough sketch. Detailing out the confines, bounds and shape of your subject is the first step to coming to understand your project. Either it's size, demands or nature. This can be where concept art comes into play, where we talking grander sorts of projects. Rough and unfinished renditions of the directions you want to head in the finalisation process. When it comes to story writing, this is typically the stage when I find myself writing down the odd spurred idea that comes to me, maybe as little as a sentence describing the premise as though to a stranger, maybe half a page detailing the exact thematic history of a fictional city district that I dreamt up one afternoon. Whatever it is, these are the small foundations under the project, soft and not yet hardened, thus subject to change.
Going over the rough lines with a hard pen is when you start to harden the concept into the basic shape of the idea you are pursuing. Peeking through that mess of rough lines and sharpening a shape for your pen to highlight, this is like setting up the scaffolding of an idea, the bones of the skeleton. Although the perfectly apt paradigm escapes because in the ephemeral world of ideas nothing is set until you lay the bricks. For me, I tend to line out the chapters I am going to write in bullet-point form, covering everything I need to cover in that single chapter and working out how it all flows later. At the end of the process, however, I can sit back and envision the spectre of the finished work in the mind's eye. That is when the idea first feels real.
For me this is when I know it's time to fill in the details, which for the act of writing means actually sitting down and penning the darn thing. The first draft is always known as the 'rough draft', that thing which will never see the light of day in the state it's in, but honestly that initial go around is a lot more important than it's name would have it sound. First drafts are the skin of the project, stretched over the bones and filling out the body. That is to say, they aren't disposal and useless flights of fancy that we forget about. They undergo revision, sure; but rare is the creator who totally guts an idea to rebuild it from scratch. That first draft can be reworked a hundred thousand times, but at the end of the day those words you wrote still carry the heart of what you set out to convey in the first place, revisions just go along the way of making that heart more clear to an audience.
And as I've laid out, revision is the next step. Sometimes this can come when an idea has been 'completed' in it's most basic form, and a revision is simply a time of comparison and reimagination. Taking a look at how your idea fares to the outside world, to the stimuli of others, and judging whether the correct emotions and points of interest are being hit. Some revisions can be totally transformative, taking what you started out with and reworking the very fundamentals to be about something different entirely- although at that point I think you're going back several steps and probably coming away with a new idea altogether. Of course, in the world of writing I suspect there's never quite a point where revision meets 'completion', just a point at which you are content enough to put down the pen.
So if we go back to the original query and ask again, what is in an idea- then we can come away with something esoteric, but simultaneously deeply intrinsic. Because all that an idea consists of is internal conceptualisation, reworking, remaking and refining until what we have is suitable to be shared and conveyed in a world that will accept it. And such a process can be found anywhere within nature, it's the very cycle of how we treat life itself. Birthing and coddling children until they can go out into the world, that's true across the borders of sentience as a part of who we are, and learning to expand that process to our mental faculties is just another example of how the animal kingdom shapes us still in how we think.
Personally I like to think of ideas as a deeply personal and intrinsic gem, a nugget of our own that exposes some vulnerability when shared. As opposed to the communal headspace of ideas that Yung envisions, although there is some ethereally comforting allusion to unspeakable community in such an idea that I suppose is somewhat envious. If ideas are made out of the guts of other ideas, then we we can assume that those discard fragments of unworthy dreams find themselves sucked into the shared-psyche of society, rewritten and recycled out as something new for a different head to work with. A wastefree headspace. So now you've heard me ramble, it's your turn to answer: What is in an idea?
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