This essay by Neil Gaiman on where he gets ideas really hits close to home for me. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I post weekly pages from my sketchbooks. My journals are the heart of my artistic practice and are filled with more ideas than I will ever be able to produce in 10 lifetimes. I like it like that!
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
I'm truly a daydreamer, imagining large complicated projects. Dreaming up bigger, more grandiose ways to express my vision. But that is not where the true work begins.
The Ideas aren't the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.
Although I work in words I'm a visual artist first, bit this same concept is true for my projects. Doing the steps. One step after another. Taking the time to really develop a project and make it fit my vision. It doesn't mean there isn't compromising – I often change or scale back work to be realistic. This is my job as an artist and I enjoy it!