Why Are There Way, Way, WAAAY More Ideas Than Fics? · 12:00pm Aug 18th, 2020
Blog Number 89: "It's Not A Bug, It's A Feature" Edition
I am working on a hypothesis: that a glut of ideas and half-finished fics is actually a natural and normal part of the creative process, at least for writing. It's based on a parallel in another field: the biological phenomenon of mass spawning.
The hypothesis goes like this: writing a project to completion is unexpectedly difficult. Extremely difficult. Basically, the odds of any one project fully reaching fruition is low.
To compensate, like those animals and plants that produce millions of spores/eggs/seeds/young, the writer generates dozens if not hundreds of projects over the course of their pursuit. They won't all necessarily be related to each other, or even appear at the same time, but we can still think of them as a "generation".
Some will die from lack of feeding (e.g. research). Some will die from complications (e.g. writing themselves into a corner). Some will die from simple bad luck (e.g. authorial whim). Overall, lots will stumble at various stages of the writing process and ultimately die off.
But the good news is that some projects do run the gauntlet successfully, enough so that they survive to reach adulthood. Out of dozens if not hundreds of failed ideas, a handful will go on to make a complete writer portfolio.
Once each one is done, it will thus make way for the next generation of ideas. A completed idea frees up a slot on the author's to-do list. Therefore, the cycle will begin again.
Now, there's a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis. The weak version is simple and unremarkable: it tends to happen, as a byproduct of most creative endeavours. It's as simple as the fact that one idea leads to one completed project, so obviously you have to have either an equal ratio of ideas to completed projects (for the same reason you have to have at least one child to get at least one adult), or you have to have more ideas than completed projects. It's a boring mathematical inevitability.
The strong version is way more interesting and is what I'm trying to get at, but as a result it would be harder to prove: there not only will be but must be a massive number of ideas compared to the number of actual completed fics. It is a necessary component. That is, you cannot have a completed project without a gigantic amount of creative collateral damage. I'm talking about a ratio that's not merely two or three ideas to one completed work: it's dozens, hundreds, or in extreme cases possibly even thousands of ideas dying to make one completed fic.
The latter is the more interesting hypothesis, but by the same token it's harder to prove and easier to disprove. You only need a counterexample to call it into question if not outright disprove it.
However, I think there's at least an intuitive plausibility to it. Let me explain.
It seems so plausible to me because, when you dissect a fic, what looks simple and manageable (what could be easier than writing words, after all?), like a living organism, actually has a lot of complicated parts to it that befuddle straightforward, glib understanding.
Fleshed-out characters, narrative skeleton, a setting to inhabit, prose running like blood to keep the whole thing nourished, themes to give it a backbone (or not: there are invertebrates, after all), broader connections to other fics like an ecological web of intertextuality and references and trends and genre types.
There are complex functions going on between story and mind, even if only subconsciously. And one of the most significant things about complex functions is that they can go belly-up so, so easily. It only takes a coin-sized bit of stray food, for instance, to put your whole respiratory system in danger. And even among those animals who invest time and care into their young rather than spawn en masse and hope for the best, failure is always a missed meal or a random predator away.
Admittedly, this doesn't apply all that strongly to shorter or simpler types of writing, but I think even there, it does have an influence. After all, if shorter stories were that easy to generate, this site's current output would look like a drop in the ocean compared to the full potential of every writer on this site.
Fact is, though, that even a bit of genre fiction has a lot of components working together in the fictional world and out of it (who's involved, what they're doing, what emotions are dominant, the way they talk, the consistency of the depiction, the pre-existing common pool of intermingling tropes and prejudices and stock imagery and so on).
A lot of people won't be aware of the multiple layers and associations and grey areas and the way a concept in one context might - without any internal change - look completely different in another. But then, they're not aware of the myriad thousands of small intricacies preventing their biological bodies from dropping dead in any given second, to say nothing of larger psychological and social complexities behind every seemingly normal, common sense, or unremarkable action. Just because you don't look backstage at a performance, doesn't mean there's no serious work going on.
The only thing I haven't figured out yet (apart from, obviously, whether it's true) is what the ratio is between doomed and successful projects, a ratio which might in any case vary from person to person (maybe there's a typical range?). There's also the little hiccup that a "dead" project, unlike a dead animal or plant, can come back to life at a later stage if revisited.
And this whole thing is probably more a flash-in-the-pan interesting metaphor than anything that'd hold up to rigorous scrutiny, if anyone could study it formally.
Either way, I'm using it for now. But I'm curious if anyone else has thought along these lines.
Impossible Numbers, out.
I hadn't thought of the creative process as r-selective, but it does make sense. Though given the amount of care and energy that goes into raising a idea into a full-fledged story, the metaphor has some holes in it.
5337931
Ha, r-selection and K-selection. Haven't stumbled across those terms in a while.
Sadly, yes, it's true. The hypothesis breaks down when you get, say, passion projects that are more like lovingly raised children than cannon fodder spawn.
I suppose I could be cheeky and compare the ideas stage to the fertilization of an egg cell by one sperm cell competing with millions, but that would defeat the purpose of the whole metaphor. Mainly because, if we're going to allow the conception stage in, then we end up with something unfalsifiable (how could we measure the number of privately conceived and non-conceived ideas without them being written down by a conscientious writer, who has no compelling incentive to do so?).
And we end up not really saying anything of interest when it comes to fic production versus dead-end fics.
I think in reality, the best I can hope for is that a few people might find the metaphor occasionally useful.
5337931
Not forgetting there are key differences between a work of art and a biological organism (the applicability of "death", for one thing).
I'd taken for granted that creators nearly always have more ideas than completed projects, but that's an interesting metaphor to think about. Another nuance is that in nature, r- versus K-selection is a gradient, you have examples like some marsupials that provide their offspring with a period of intense parental care, but give birth to more young than can possibly survive. (A mother Tasmanian devil can have 30 babies in a litter, but she only has four nipples, so...)
5338835
Yeah, in hindsight, I think the blog title I went for looks a bit too "Captain Obvious" for its own good.
Agreed. Most things in biology are rarely a simple binary. And it's funny you mention marsupials: some people think of marsupials as a sort of primitive side project to the main placental line (i.e. the one with us in it), and yet these same marsupials have a surprisingly convoluted reproductive strategy, arguably more complicated than ours (for one thing, a developing embryo in a human doesn't have to get out and crawl partway through development, just to transfer to what's effectively a second uterus).
Stuff like that pre-natal precociousness is even worse for tiger sharks (I think it was tiger sharks... some sharks, anyway) which give birth to live young, but first conceive of multiple young who eat each other while still in their mother. You have to wonder if it's some kind of first test.
Ah, but it's necessarily an incomplete one, so I'm wary about applying it too hard. It's a useful painkiller concept when I'm looking at a load of projects I haven't finished yet, but the reality is that art just doesn't "reproduce" the same way organisms do.
That said, the comparison of art with biology makes a kind of sense, with all those complex interlocking elements of a story, like organs working together to create a single coherent body. Plus, there's some territory overlap (e.g. the germ idea, growth via development, "birth" as publication, works in a genre "inheriting" from their forebears), in the same way both planes and birds have to obey the rules of aerodynamics while still being very different in their origin.
Come to that, I think it probably helps more if the comparison is less with moving animals and more with sedentary life forms, like plants or bacterial colonies.
5338981
It's an imperfect analogy, to be sure. But that there are parallels at all makes an interesting thought experiment, and it's the first time I've seen anyone bring them up!