Developing an idea is much like developing an invention.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter and founder of the Royal Academy, tells us that invention is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory.

Despite the ingenious preacher, nothing can come of nothing, at least by manmade efforts. He who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations.

Accordingly, the idea searcher explores human experience and thought—history, psychology, science—anything and everything for analogies and stepping stones for the imagination.

The more extensive our acquaintance with the work of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be our own ingenuity. Then when an image comes to us, we can use it, juggle with it, be receptive to its possibilities, not simply hold it isolated as an amusing or interesting curiosity, but have it as a basis for experiment.

Most of us get ideas that we do not develop in this way, and nothing ever comes of them.

Continued from ....How to Get IDEAS by Estelle H. Ries

 

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