(3 min read.) “It all made sense at 2am but I forgot it when I woke up.” Lost your creative idea? Here’s some comfort from me and from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
If you had a good creative idea and feel like you lost it, that’s fine.
It’s okay to let a good idea go. If it’s really yours, it’ll come back.
Look, we’ve probably all seen inspiration depicted as one-time magical event. The lightbulb goes on, the lightning strikes, the muse visits. The inspiration APPEARS. The creative idea arrives. Then in a blink, it’s GONE. If you didn’t catch it on a notepad, you’ll never get that spark back. It didn’t come from you; it was a bolt from the blue, and you fumbled it.
Well frankly, I think this is a load of nuclear-level hooey and absolutely violently stinky horse poop.
Genius is persistent. If a good creative idea comes to you, it’ll come back. (I’m not the only one who thinks this!!! More on that later.) Don’t panic over losing the spark; if it was only a spark, it wasn’t a fire. And that good idea didn’t come from “the muse.” It came from YOU. It was a product of your unique perspective, your unique personality, and your unique lived experiences. If you made one good idea, you can make another the same way, out of the same stuff.
When you come up with a truly great idea… you’re stuck with it. It might bounce away for a while and come back in another shape or form, but even if it changes a bit, it won’t vanish. Now, your feelings around it may evolve. The burst of energy or “aha!” excitement it arrived with might dissipate. But frankly, that dopamine haze was always going to fade before you finished your project anyway. You were always going to have to keep going after it stopped shimmering.
Ideas are cheap.
Don’t stress about capturing every single good idea you have. Instead, put your energy on becoming even more creative so that you’re generating awesome creative ideas all the time! Your job is to be an idea machine. Ideas aren’t precious, and you’re free to waste them. Generate more good ideas than you can ever use or act on! Become a tidal wave of insight and genius.
(If you want to generate more ideas: diversify your influences, prime your aesthetic, and support your brain health. I’ll write a blog post about how to generate more creative ideas using that trio soon, but if you want to know more ASAP I’ll help you strategize it out loud in a sliding scale coaching session.)
The point here is that if you’re worried you’ve lost a good idea, don’t chase the one that got away.
Just have another idea.
Ideas come and go.
Ideas are CHEAP.
Ideas are a crush. Writing is a love story. You can get a crush anytime. They’re fun. But what turns a good idea from a flush of delight into a real love story is the commitment you make to finding out everything it can become. Ideas will pop up and disappear. What makes them good isn’t the quality of the inspiration. What makes them good is what you do about it.
So, if you had a good idea but you lost it? You forgot it? You didn’t write it down, or your notes about it are an indecipherable maze of nonsense? Your creative idea is lost to the void and all you have left is a gnawing sense that you missed it? That’s FINE.
The best ideas might appear in flash. But they don’t leave. The real genius-keeper-lifechanging creative ideas are the ones that refuse to leave.
Mozart on Choosing a Creative Idea
Mozart (arguably the most inspired artist ever to live) said the ideas he acted on were the ones he would “retain in memory” until it would occur to him “how I may turn this or that morsel to account so as to make a good dish.” (source.)
Part of what makes a creative idea worth pursuing is that it sticks around. Really useful and novel ideas won’t leave you alone. They stick in your memory, the way they’ll stick in the memories of your audience when they meet them later.
If your inspiration vanished before you were able to capture it, it wasn’t good enough for Mozart.
If it wasn’t good enough for Mozart, why should it be good enough for you?
If you forgot your creative idea, I hope this pep talk comforted you a bit, but I’m not just blowing smoke to make you feel better. The best creative ideas are STICKY and PERSISTENT. I really mean it, and so did Mozart!
xo, megan
There’s no one way to write. There’s only your way. I hope some of my tactics and ideas can help you find it.
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