Where do ideas come from?

I watched Twilight just recently as I thought it was about time I found out what all the fuss was about. I quite enjoyed it and I can see its appeal, especially for a teenage audience, on a superficial level (hot vampires; Pattinson frenzy and all that!) as well as a deeper level (with themes of self-control, trust and not fitting in; all that usual adolescent stuff!). What I liked most about this sickly romance was that at its core is a story about love over lust and showing self-control in place of selfishness. This felt like a refreshingly new theme and one which is rather good to hear in our lustful self-centred society though I was less keen on the setting of the story. I think it was a cast member in an interview that said, “Everyone wants to be a vampire” and I just had to helplessly shake my head and say, “Oh dear”. However, my main reason for mentioning Twilight is that though now a worldwide phenomenon it originated from a dream Stephenie Meyer had one night, and this got me thinking…

The concept of an ‘idea’ is one that I have been trying to understand for sometime now. Isn’t it interesting that the language we use when talking about ideas suggests that they are external things, existing outside of ourselves? We say “I had an idea” suggesting the idea was something that was already there, we just had to let it out. Or often we think of ideas penetrating in, like when we say, “I got an idea” or “It came to me” or “I was hit by an idea”. We rarely talk about forming or creating an idea but rather we generally view ‘ideas’ as the raw material with which we then form other things, such as stories, products, business plans, organisations and so on. The idea for Twilight “came to” Stephenie Meyer in a dream and she herself could not explain where it had come from. Yet neatly packaged in that single image was all the potential needed to create what this series has become today. And Twilight is not the only example of this. J.K. Rowling was on a delayed and crowded train journey from Manchester to London when the character of Harry Potter suddenly “fell into her head”. The vast and epic world of Middle-Earth and all that grew from it began life when Tolkien was suddenly and randomly inspired to write on a blank sheet of paper, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. The amazing land of Narnia sprung into C.S. Lewis’s mind in sudden strange images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. In fact the more we think about big successful ventures and trace them back to their conception the more we realise that the best ideas are not man-made nor necessarily looked for but are, more often than not, handed to a surprised but grateful recipient on a platter. So why? And if ideas exist separate from humanity (as the evidence above would suggest) then where exactly do they exist? Are they floating in an atmospheric swirl all around us and just occasionally one is unexpectedly pushed into our consciousness? Here’s what I think.

I believe in God. I believe in a creative and imaginative God who made an intricate and expansive universe, a beautiful world and an intelligent human race with minds not too dissimilar from His own. I also believe (and I’m afraid I’m not backing this up Biblically, this is purely speculation) God created, and creates, ideas. His ideas are the most perfect, original and interesting ideas we could ever imagine and though our human minds are unable to comprehend His ideas in their purest form He is constantly preparing and gifting little ideas to us. So this is why we talk about an idea “coming to us” with no warning and from an unknown source. God gives them to us. However, we live in a fallen world, we are defiled by sin, and therefore these mini perfect ideas we are given become instantly corrupted and mangled the moment they enter our minds yet, by grace, mankind has been able to make some wonderful stories with them nonetheless. I have often thought when working on a project that sometimes the idea itself remains stronger and more powerful than all the work I’ve done in trying to develop it. So there we have it, such are my reflections thus far on the mystery that is the ‘idea’. And next time I watch a great film, or read a great book, or hear a great story I will simply have to sit back and marvel at this thought – we were His idea.