One of my design coworkers, who will remain nameless in order to preserve his dignity, told me a dirty little secret: video game designers really aren’t that clever. He told me that they just keep tossing out idea after idea and turning them over and over until something good comes out of it.
I then told him a dirty little secret about writers and other creative professionals: We do the exact same thing.
One of the best things I’ve learned about brainstorming and idea generation is that it’s always worthwhile to write down the first idea that comes into your head, but only so you are never tempted to use it. Anything you’re trying to think of an idea for something, the obvious idea is almost never the right answer. Even if you’re intentionally going for something iconic, it’s always better to put some form of twist on it. The line between iconic and cliché is incredibly fine.
I’ve come to think of it as idea churn. It’s technically a form of brainstorming, but it violates a key rule. When you’re brainstorming, you’re not supposed to judge anything that comes out of it – it’s only later when you’re harvesting the ideas that you make judgment calls on how valid the ideas are. The reason behind this is that it frees people up from thinking that ideas are good or bad, and any scrap of inspiration might lead to something cool later on.
In idea churn, though, you’re pre-judging some of the ideas. When you sit down, you’re accepting that the first handful idea are going to be shit, so you’re only writing them down so you can get them out of the way and dig deeper into the concept. It’s a way to allow yourself to go through the obvious and cliché ideas and recognize them as such before you dig deeper into the concept.
For example, let’s say I wanted to write a story about a vampire. If I were to sit down and do idea churn, the first few examples might be something like this:
- Main character was made a vampire against their will
- Main character is a mortal that looks like the vampire’s long lost love
- Vampire lives in a lonely castle
- Vampire comes from Eastern Europe
Many of those ideas are extremely overdone. However, by putting them into the first part of the churn, I can get them out of my head and start digging down into other, more interesting ideas.
Another side benefit of the churned idea list is that you can look at them and find ways to subvert the stereotypes. Looking at the list above again, maybe there’s an interesting idea in which the vampire comes from a different, but equally exotic, part of the world. Maybe the main character doesn’t resemble the vampire’s long lost love, but a hated enemy. Taking a portion of an old idea and twisting it is an easy and powerful way to come up with new and interesting ideas.
What an interesting idea. I’ve been struggling with ideas for a new Scion character concept, and I think I’ll give this a shot for her backstory. Thanks!
Great points. I did a little of this during the synopsis phase of the STRANGENESS novel, but should have followed through with the idea churn more (as you illustrate above), as I just found myself doing it in the transition to the second draft (after lots of heavy lifting) anyway. I looked at my iconic figure, the tormented dude who communes with the dead, and realized it was treading on cliche — enough that I wanted to shovel-bash the next necro-seer-medium to say, “It’s my gift…and my curse.”
Then the subversive thoughts hit and I realized it would be fore fun if said character was not only NOT tormented by his gift but pathologically addicted to it and always desperate for his next fix.
I mainly associate this process with writing outlines. I think of it as unclogging the design pipeline.
In regards to this part: “In idea churn, though, you’re pre-judging some of the ideas. When you sit down, you’re accepting that the first handful idea are going to be shit, so you’re only writing them down so you can get them out of the way and dig deeper into the concept. It’s a way to allow yourself to go through the obvious and cliché ideas and recognize them as such before you dig deeper into the concept.”
I think that this is part and parcel of brainstorming – you just don’t do the culling until later. I suppose the idea churn concept is more true to itself. You don’t judge ideas in brainstorming because they’re all awesome, you don’t judge them so you don’t slow down the process.
I guess I see them as two different ways of looking at the same thing.
Well, how we do brainstorming internally, we don’t judge the ideas because it might form the seed of a different idea down the road during the brainstorming process. It’s not that they’re all awesome, but it’s because shooting down one idea might close the road to other ideas in that vein that could be better.
This is an concept. I always find it very hard in brainstorming not to judge ideas — it’s really pretty reflexive with me. But I fear that with this approach, by purposefully putting out crap ideas first, those ideas might actually get stuck in my head.