Translator: Austin Wagner

Workshop Diary 8

Where do you get your ideas? Writers are constantly getting this question, and it’s not because of wanting to keep some big secret that they’re reluctant to answer, it’s because most of them don’t even know. That aha moment, that ding of the lightbulb above the cartoon character’s head, is often unexpected and incomprehensible. From the outside it may all seem very mystical, an artist being “kissed by the muse,” or the “stroke of inspiration.” As if they weren’t even trying, and it just fell into their lap like a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Of course, ideas don’t work like raffles. But when the question is not where, but how, it’s difficult to give a real answer – unless you’re Hilde Østby, author of the popular science book Creativity, who used brain research and scientific tools to map out what’s happening in the brain when ideas take shape.

I don’t like talking about my ideas. Usually because the moment of their birth is mundane. I would much rather say that Skin and Hide was the result of long and arduous research into the limits of animal existence, an intentional literary plan pushing back against the anthropocentric worldview. But in reality, I just thought how unfair it is that rabbits are always the scaredy-cats in the stories, that if I were in the rabbits’ shoes I would’ve tried to find someone to represent my interests. That’s not a story people like to tell. But this is what the aha moment really is: when all the earlier ideas, themes, and knowledge just click, and something new is born. The lightbulb going off, with its overrated and blown-out-of-proportion significance. What really matters is what happens before and after: how did I get to this moment, and what do I do with it now that I’m here. 

Aha moments are much more common than great ideas. An aha moment is when we reach the punchline of a joke, when we find the solution to a logic puzzle, or when we suddenly realize that the reason for our partner’s strange behavior for several months is because they have a secret lover. Everything suddenly sharpens, it all becomes clear. We later look back on these as moments of clarity and significance, the discovery feels justified (even if it’s not). It happens so suddenly and so uncontrollably that it’s easy to see it as mystical.

But it’s just our brain putting the moment on a pedestal. It’s the rewarding hit of dopamine, the emotional activation of the amygdala, and memory imprinting that are to blame. The moment itself is what gets emphasized, it eclipses the process that led to it, as if the idea simply popped out of thin air.

But it doesn’t work without the process. We only have the aha moments about things we’ve been thinking about for a long time. When we’ve gathered the pieces of the puzzle, and it’s just in that moment that they happen to come together. Einstein was a teenager when he first asked what would happen if you traveled at the speed of light. At work one morning, ten years later, he discovered his theory of relativity. At least that’s how it looks to the outside world. We see the grandiosity of the moment, not the ten years Einstein spent thinking, planning, researching, tossing and turning sleeplessly.

If the process didn’t matter, we’d be having aha moments in fields we know nothing about. I’m not going to understand physics problems out of nowhere, and a physicist won’t knock on my door with solutions for the obstacles in my novels.

Aha moments are built on brainstorming, research, and actively seeking out ideas, but you can’t force it too directly. Only one-fifth of enlightenment occurs when the brain is in executive mode, when it’s actively focusing on something. It is far more common during so-called default mode network activation, when alpha waves are present. In this state we do not act, we don’t look for solutions, the brain wanders aimlessly, we’re dreaming.

The brain is bored. I write down this word, and suddenly creativity doesn’t seem so mystical. If we want ideas, we need to be bored more often.

From the time we’re children, we hate being bored. So much so that Hilde Østby’s book cites a study in which participants had to be bored for fifteen minutes, no phone, no distractions. And they started giving themselves small electrical shocks, just so that something would happen. One of the participants shocked themselves one hundred and ninety times. For adults, of course, boredom is a luxury, there’s no time to relax, in the culture of utility its anathema to admit a lack of productivity. Nobody blocks off their calendar from three to four in the afternoon for ‘boredom.’ There’s no such thing as a neutral gear. And if somehow there is, we shift out of it, we reach for our phones as we wait for the elevator or the bus, we bring a book to the waiting room, we do anything, even give ourselves electrical shocks, to not be bored.

I’ve never been as bored as I was in the summer of 2021. Both of my hips were inflamed and on fire, it hurt no matter what I did. Sitting, lying on my side, walking, everything. All I could do was lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. I couldn’t even hold a book or watch a TV show for long, it became too uncomfortable too quickly – I tried to draw out the time with podcasts and audiobooks.

And I was bored. Extremely bored.

And in this boredom, a thought I’d been kicking around in my head for six months kept popping up: what would happen if we could sign contracts to rewrite the laws of nature. That wasn’t when I got the idea – that was a different aha moment – and I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to go with it. All I had were notions of worldbuilding, conflicts, characters, a seething mass. Then one night before bed, a particularly good time for alpha waves, a small detail snapped into place: I needed one more character. The was my aha moment, from there everything fell into place, everything got its purpose, and thanks to the dopamine I became incredibly excited.

I could have also made this sound more mystical. I could have said that I was lying on my back, literally everything hurting, I’d had enough of it all, and then I was “kissed by the muse,” “inspiration struck.” But in reality, my brain had gotten into the right state to piece together the mosaic I’d been shoving around for almost half a year.

I had never before felt as creative, as bold, as spontaneous as I did then, my stories never progressed so easily as they did in those three months. Even though I had to write most of the story standing up, since I was still unable to sit down.

I would gladly return to that state, though I know that’s not very realistic. I can’t withdraw from the world that much again. From responsibilities, plans, distractions. And besides, my phone has grown into my hand, how could I set it aside again for months at a time? Maybe if I stayed in a log cabin with no reception.

Or I could block off my calendar with times for boredom.

How do you get your ideas? Something like this: think about a problem for a long time, read about it, dig into the topic, ponder, make inferences. And be bored. Take a shower, putz in the garden, walk the dog; Agatha Christie came up with her books while doing the dishes. Let your brain wander aimlessly until the pieces click into place. Rinse and repeat until the book is finished – a book is not a single idea, but a constant search for solutions, a string of aha moments.

Hilde Østby experienced another possibility as well: she suffered a bicycle accident, slammed into a pillar of a bridge and got a concussion. Her temporal lobe was damaged, which causes an uncontrollable, free-flowing flood of ideas in her, suddenly dozens of book concepts appeared.

I won’t say it isn’t a little tempting.

But she also recommends the longer of the two options: boredom involves much less risk and far fewer side effects.