Some Assorted Thoughts On Life and Happiness and Everything, Part V

This post is about destiny.

No, it's not another Judy post (come back tomorrow). This one is about something even Judy's formidable powers cannot foresee: ideas.

As a writer, you spend an inordinate amount of your life sitting in a room and banging your head against a desk. The only reason anyone would willingly choose such a life is that she has become obsessed with a beautiful idea.

Ideas are your most fragile and precious resource. They are both your livelihood and fuel, and you spend a lot of time waiting for them to appear. You "research": you read, you watch movies, you talk to people. You survey the landscape, take soil samples, and drill down, hoping for another big strike.

More often than not, you don't find it. Your greatest fear is that you've tapped out your wells. But the truth is, all of this "research" is a sham: you have no idea when or where an idea will appear. Ideas only seep slowly and unpredicatably from the most obscure crevasses and fissures of your life. They spring from the most trivial moments, the most chance encounters, the silliest events.

Don't believe me? Here's a roundup of my writing projects and their origin stories:

The Last Whatever: During high school, I walk across a courtyard and see an autumn leaf floating across the ground, traveling in perfect concentric circles. (Uh, that's it. And this script got me a ton of meetings and recognition. Ridiculous.)

Waxahachie Air: I buy a cheap paperback pulp, read a few chapters of it, and toss it aside. My friend Wallace shows up, picks up the book, reads a chapter I hadn't read, tells me, "Hey, this is interesting." I read the chapter he's talking about, and say, "You're right. I want to make a movie out of this."

Pillow Crisis: I go to a Minibosses show at Meltdown Comics. I idly thumb through some lame time-traveling comic while waiting for the band to go on. Bam! Random idea strikes. (I can't even tell you the name of the comic.)

Lobsters vs. Butterflies: My brother gets a summer job as a game tester at my former place of employment. He spends a lot of time in the Quality Assurance room with other adolescent guys, playing games, talking shit, and watching anime. His coworker introduces him to one Naruto Uzumaki, who immediately becomes an obsession of my brother's. Jon loads up my hard drive with twenty gigs of episodes, and makes me promise to watch it. He returns to college. I forget about Naruto. And then, one day, I quit my job. Suddenly, I have all the time in the world. I'm bored. So I watch some Naruto. And watch some more. Take a few breaks for meals and sleep. Watch even more. And as I'm watching, a story crystallizes in my head: the idea, the tone, the world.

Those stories are quite possibly the most banal things I've ever written. But their banality supports my thesis: a writer's entire career balances on the point of the most trivial and ephemeral moments.

What if I hadn't crossed the courtyard that day? What if I hadn't gone to the Minibosses show? What if my brother hadn't worked at the game company? Three whole years of my life - the years I spent chasing those random ideas down - would have been radically different.

There's a small, whimsical form of destiny at work here. And the only thing I can tell you about it, with any certainty, is that it feeds on idle time. It only sneaks up on you when you're ready to play. It only works when you step away from your desk.

One of the primary aims of my little experiment - of these eighteen months - has been to give myself as much idle time as possible. I can guarantee you that if I hadn't quit my job, I would never have watched seventy episodes of a Japanese animated series about a hyperactive twelve-year-old who wears an orange jumpsuit and yells a lot.

But I did.

And doing so might very well mean the beginning of an entire career.