Peanut Buttering

Day 30

If you wrote something every day, how long would it take until you ran out of new things to say?

Even as I exhausted my store of writing ideas during these last thirty days, I replenished the store and then some. If it weren't for the ideas I forgot before writing them down, the store would be even more full.

But I tend to use up the best ideas from my stockpile, while generating new ideas of randomly varying quality. So can I know for sure whether the net "idea-mass" in my reserves has increased or decreased over this period?

I wrote about finite resources a few days ago. Are ideas another form of finite stuff? Growing up, I always feared the idea of working in an occupation like a cartoonist. If you have to write a daily cartoon, what if you just can't think of something good that day? You can't will yourself to have a good idea, can you?

One explanation for the sophomore slump is that an artist spends their entire life building up experiences and opinions to generate the material for their first Great Work, but then only has a few years to make the next one. But what of those artists who have no slump? Did they just generate a vast base of material that they can mine for many more works to come, or did they really find a way to accelerate their generation of new ideas? What would the latter look like?

These questions have at various times worried me.

But I've come around to the idea that on any meaningful timeframe, ideas are not finite. Running out is a non-issue. Instead, there are pitfalls which if not properly inspected look an awful lot like running out of ideas. Generally, the root cause is either a reluctance to Babble, or an excess of Prune.

Here have been thirty days of babble, with a minimum of prune. An attempt to unseat some counterproductive habits, and to seed some new ones.

Thanks for reading.