Most ideas come out malformed in some way. They’re incomplete, blurry, incorrect, or simply not profound enough. It’s rare to have a fully polished thought pop into your head, and while persistent iteration might forge a malformed idea into one that’s fit to publish, sometimes you just hit a wall. What then? Is the idea dead? Not exactly, no incomplete idea ever truly dies. One day you may return to it (or it may return to you) with a renewed perspective.
I keep a running note of essay ideas. I regularly come back to this document, adding new ideas and appending to existing ones. I wrote down the original outline to my most recent essay a few months ago – it was meant to be an analysis of Tom Sachs’s art, but it didn’t feel interesting enough to publish an entire post on. So I left a note and moved on. Then a few months later I came across an interesting tweet and a new essay popped into focus. I went to write it in my document when I saw that I could weave my original idea right into this one. The outline snapped together within an hour and I finished the piece the next day. I could’ve pushed out my original essay, but I’m glad I didn’t.
Prolific artists naturally let ideas simmer. They have high quality bars, so not everything they start is fit to publish. Prince is rumored to have over 8,000 unpublished songs in a literal, physical vault. Some songs are scrapped because they’re bad, others just don’t fit within the theme of an album or they have a sample that couldn’t clear. Whatever the reason, these become good references in later songwriting sessions – it’s easier to compose semi-complete pieces than to write something entirely from scratch.
In an interview detailing the production process of their hit song ‘Bad Guy’, Billie Eilish and Finneas revealed that Billie initially made the outro for the song separately, but left it untouched and unreleased for a year. The two started working on another song (which was to become the first part of ‘Bad Guy’) and were trying to figure out the lyrics, when Finneas’s ad-libbing sparked an idea to connect the two tracks.
You know that song I made, that was like ‘I’m a bad guy’? What if we made this song, that song? Like what if we just turned this into that song?
Billie doesn’t say why she didn’t develop the outro into its own song right away; it probably wasn’t good enough to stand on its own. So she shelved it, and it came back into focus randomly when making something entirely different. [1]
It’s not enough to let an idea simmer if you don’t like it. You usually have to keep working on other projects. Shelved ideas only resurface when sparked by new ones – it’s not just that you couldn’t figure out how to polish the idea, it’s that the concept itself was incomplete and must be connected to something else. And the best way to get new ideas is to keep producing.
Impossible
A similar phenomenon is coming up with an idea, abandoning it because it simply isn’t possible, then returning to it once technology progresses. James Cameron initially wrote the script for Avatar in 1995, but realized that CGI tech wasn’t advanced enough to produce what he envisioned.
We did initial budgets and started to go into the digital feasibility in 1996 before we started “Titanic.” Then “Titanic” sort of took over my life for a couple of years. I didn’t really return to the project until I saw that there was significant advancements in facial performance in character and animation.
This is distinct from creative simmering because you know what you want to pursue, but physical constraints don’t allow it yet. [2] Even so, I imagine Cameron didn’t implement Avatar verbatim as he envisioned 10 years prior. He revisited the old script with new experience and perspective.
Influences
Others’ ideas can simmer in your mind just as your own do. The tricky part is remembering which are yours, and which are borrowed.
There is a concept called cryptomnesia popularized by the psychologist Carl Jung. Essentially, it means misremembering a memory as a novel thought. Jung discovered a curious example of this phenomenon with Nietzsche:
I myself found a fascinating example of this in Nietzsche's book Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the author reproduces almost word for word an incident reported in a ship's log for the year 1689. By sheer chance I had read this seaman's yarn in a book published about 1835 (half a century before N wrote); and when I found the similar passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra, I was struck by its peculiar style, which was different from Nietzsche's usual language. I was convinced that N must also have seen the old book, though he made no reference to it (little surprise there). I wrote to his sister, who was still alive, and she confirmed that she and her brother had in fact read the book together when he was 11 years old. I think, from the context, it is inconceivable that N had any idea that he was plagiarizing this story. I believe that fifty years later it had unexpectedly slipped into focus in his conscious mind.
Musicians are especially scared of cryptomnesia because copyright law is so tough. There are only so many melodies, and if your song bares passing resemblance to another (even if by accident) it could mean giving up a big chunk of your royalties.
The tune to “Yesterday” came to Paul McCartney in a dream. The melody was so catchy he didn’t believe it was his – he surely thought he had heard it somewhere else. Paul went around playing it to people for weeks, asking if they recognized the tune. Only after a while of no one recognizing it did he conclude that it must be original.
Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought that if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I would have it.
Some Beatles weren’t so lucky. George Harrison was sued over his song “My Sweet Lord”’s resemblance to an R&B record released 10 years earlier. Harrison claims he wasn’t aware of it when writing his song, but the resemblance is undeniable, and he lost the suit. Copyright law makes no exception for cryptomnesia.
When should you give up on a stubborn idea, and let it simmer? I don’t have a clear answer for that. Sometimes things just fall into place without much resistance, but other times you need to push against mental blocks longer than feels comfortable. What I mean to point out is that shelving an idea doesn’t mean scrapping it entirely, it can always re-emerge later.
When should you publish an incomplete idea anyway, in spite of its imperfections? In purely creative domains, this decision is up to your own taste. For this reason, I find the fascination with “unreleased” music odd, especially posthumous albums released after an artist dies. These songs were unreleased for a reason, and releasing them often feels like a money-grab and a disservice to the artist’s legacy. Talent is just as much about what you choose to cut as what you choose to release.
But a worse outcome is to let your perfectionism and fear prevent you from publishing anything at all. Good artists copy, great artists steal, real artists ship.
Footnotes
[1] I found this example from a great post by Sebastian Bensusan, about "creative kernels". The idea is that creative ideas start with a single salient element, like a melody, instrument, or lyric, and the other components are left as placeholders and filled in later. Billie's unfinished outro formed the "kernel" for this song.
[2] This isn’t to imply that Cameron merely rode on the waves of fully-developed CGI tech, he may have done more to advance CGI than anyone else. He just realized where the frontier had moved, and it was close enough to his vision that he could push ahead from there. In an interview about the film he said, “I think the time is right to revisit [Avatar]. We’ll still have to push it farther than it’s ever been pushed, but I think the time is right to take a look at this” - link
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