Back to Basics: When You’re Short on Big Ideas, Think Small

There are days when you come to your writing desk or your easel or your block of stone and discover you’re empty inside. You’ve no idea what you’re going to produce from that blank piece of paper, that empty stretch of canvas, that chunk of alabaster.

Void of big ideas, you grow restless, perhaps a bit frightened. “Oh no,” you think, “It’s happened. I’ve run out of ideas. I’m finished. I’m through.”

Think Small and Get Back to the Basics

This, I have found, is a good time to return to the basics, to let yourself off the hook for a while and turn your focus to simpler things, to think small. If you’re a musician or a song writer, it might be a good time to practice your finger exercises or play the scales. If you’re an actor, perhaps it’s a time to practice a familiar monologue or recite a favorite poem.

I once heard someone remark that the basic job of a writer is to craft sentences. I found this liberating. I’d always thought the job of a writer was to write an epic screenplay or a fabulous poem. But now, whenever I’m feeling stuck, I just write sentences.

Building Blocks

I bought a little book called The Art of Styling Sentences by K.D. Sullivan and Anne Longknife (I love that name), and it’s become one of my favorites. It outlines 20 basic sentence patterns, and the idea is to master them by constructing your own. Today it was Pattern 14: a prepositional phrase before the subject and verb.

It was my own empty feeling, my own lack of big ideas, that lead me to pull the book from the shelf. I put on some music, and started writing sentences. I wrote about a dozen or so, then one caught my eye.

Behind the trees, a man was adjusting the straps on something black and leathery.

I like that sentence. It makes me curious. Who is that man? What is he fiddling with? Is it a satchel? If so, what’s in it? Is someone watching him? Is he a good man or a bad man?

Whether or not I do anything with that sentence, it’s in my head and I no longer feel like a man bereft of ideas.

Squirkling for Fun

You might be wondering about the image at the top of the page, a collection of boxes filled with a lot of scribbling. But it’s not scribbling, it’s squirkling, a shading technique I learned from one of the amazing drawing tutorials at DrawSpace.com. And it’s precisely the kind of basic thing you might do when you’re out of big ideas.

I even like the term. Squirkling. I think it’s a good name for just about any kind of activity like this. It doesn’t look like much at first, but when mastered and used properly it can become a part of something big.

Small, basic things like scales, and sentences, and squirkling can provide a number of benefits. They take your mind off the fear of running empty, provide you with an opportunity to practice the art of focused attention, and help you to develop your craft by building your skill set and adding to your bag of tricks.

And more often than not, they lead to something bigger.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I simply must find out what that man behind the trees is up to.