Digging into Your Bad Ideas
Don't abandon creative impulses simply because you’re afraid they won’t work out.
I’ve been catching up on my film viewing recently, including 20,000 Days on Earth, a documentary about the singer/songwriter Nick Cave. I’m using the term “documentary” a bit loosely here—the film definitely stars Nick Cave as a musician named Nick Cave, following him over the course of a single day as he writes and records songs you can for sure find on a Nick Cave album, remembering things that happened in the life of Nick Cave, and yet there’s also that lengthy detour to the archive where Cave talks with the researchers cataloguing the documents that have accumulated over his lifetime, not to mention the scenes where he’s driving in his car and people like Kylie Minogue suddenly appear in the driver’s seat and have conversations with him.
Despite those creative flourishes, though, you can clearly recognize 20,000 Days on Earth as Cave engaging in an emotionally and intellectually honest reflection on his life and his artistic process, with additional perspective on offer from co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who also collaborated with Cave on the screenplay. We see songs come together, from Cave’s initial attempts at crafting lyrics in his home office, to the group effort of putting musical ideas together in the recording studio, all the way through to a live performance. Cave’s drive to create doesn’t come across as relentless, necessary, but it should strike you as persistent, and that really came through for me with something he says near the end of the film:
“All of our days are numbered. We can not afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world; a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame, great things can be constructed around it; things that are massive and powerful and world changing. All held up by the tiniest of ideas.”
Acting on your bad ideas doesn’t mean you have to see everything through to completion and crashing failure, of course. It simply means that you shouldn’t abandon your creative impulses because you’re afraid they won’t work out. A story idea can sound ludicrous the first time it pops into your head, but perhaps if you’re willing to sit with it, you can find a way to make it work, building more and more story around it until you’ve got yourself a novel. Or maybe you don’t think anybody would want to read about what happened to you when you were younger, that your experiences wouldn’t be of interest to anyone else—and yet I can almost guarantee you that the readers who would appreciate your story, if there were a way for them to find it, exist.
(Whether there are enough of those readers to make such a book economically viable, or whether you’re able to find those readers to put the book in their hands, don’t come into play during the creative process. For now, we write!)
If you play with a “bad” idea, you’ll probably figure out soon enough whether it will get any better or not. It will fail to ring true, and you’ll realize that no matter how many different angles you tackle it from, no matter how much research you do, it will never become the story you need to tell.
Or a “bad” idea you had a long time ago and found in an old notebook might look infinitely more promising—and more compelling—today.
Even if it doesn’t lead to a successfully completed story, working on a “bad” idea will help improve your creative discipline. You put in the time, you learned what doesn’t work, and you can avoid many of those mistakes as you continue to put in the time.
As Cave says, our days are numbered. If you want to share your story with the world, you need to keep working on your story… and if you aren’t quite sure yet what your story is, maybe you should give that “bad” idea a closer look. It could surprise you.