How to Get Ideas

There is this cliché about artists that their work contains mainly of daydreaming and waiting for a stroke of inspiration and only then furiously scribbling down what the Muses deigned to bless them with.

I don’t like this view of the creative process very much because it puts the process of getting ideas out of your control. You are at fates mercy. But professional comedy writers are not only artists, we are also slaves to deadlines. And although waiting and daydreaming is an integral part of the creative process let’s focus on what we can control.

Now, I’m not telling you that being bored and waiting for you to get inspired isn’t a completely fine way of getting ideas. Nope. It totally is. I’m a big proponent of “It’s not stupid if it works”.

But especially at the beginning of your comedy writing career just hoping to have an idea can be very dispiriting. You haven’t yet proven to yourself that you can write comedy, that you actually are funny and now you have to sit in front of a blank page for hours every day, waiting for the jokefairy to come to you all the while being plagued by doubt?

Sounds cumbersome to say the least.

Even though daydreaming IS part of working when you are a creative person it just doesn’t feel like it in the beginning. When you don’t yet trust your process.

So what other path is there? Let’s take a look how other creatives have solved this problem. High-paid creatives with strict deadlines and a lot of pressure on their shoulders.

But as you probably already have come to expect by now, we need to define first what an “idea” actually is, before we go about having one.