Right now, I'm listening to a song I've listened to several times in the past. The genre is hard/heavy rock. The lyrics are sometimes ambiguous. Sometimes I can't understand what the singer is saying because he is singing too fast. The ideas/images the song wishes to inject into my brain are not the ones that actually do find their place in my consciousness.
And I prefer it that way. I don't look up the lyrics of songs when I first listen to them. I thrive on ambiguity. The singer may be saying one thing, but I heard something else that sparks an idea. Knowing the real song lyrics would ruin it for me. For example, the song I'm listening to right now may be talking about something so vastly different, but my mind takes the first impression and runs with it. Now, I have the workings of a potential story in my head. But I don't have a complete story in my head. I just have elements of a story. Those elements, by themselves, are not stories any more than one piece of a puzzle constitutes a complete picture. The next part is the fun part for me. I will take those elements I've just come up with and I will weave a story through them. All it boils down to is the question: "What if?" This method of finding ideas, for me, applies also to paintings. My favorite art movement is Romanticism. A lot of Romanticism focuses on nature and, as a fantasy writer, nature can evoke powerful ideas in my mind. But while Romanticism's focus is the power of nature, it also presents interesting characters and scenes where I imagine different and more interesting reasons for how they got there. Once again, the painting might be telling me one thing, but I, thriving on ambiguity, take away something wholly different. All in all, ideas are tricky. They are sometimes so close and personal, and at other times they are evasive and distant. Not all songs give me ideas and not all paintings speak to me. I've heard several times that ideas are cheap. While that may be true in a world where authors must sell written forms of their many thousands of ideas to make a living, ideas do have a high emotional value. The reason for this is because ideas come from sources that intend to spark emotion in the listener/viewer. To find out where ideas come from for you, you must know what incites powerful emotion within you. For some, that leads to writing. For others, it might lead to painting, drawing, singing, etc. Whatever it might be, do your best to be as creative as you can be. -MW
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