CY TWOMBLY’S STUDIO IN ROME, 1966
A hobby of mine is to answer random questions that people email me, and I figured I should publish some of the answers here so I don’t have to repeat myself.
Here’s one. A reader asked me how I go about finding interesting things to write about. I am not sure how good I am at being interesting, but I do spend a lot of time coming up with ideas—both for essays and for other contexts—and I am much better at it than I used to be. So:
It is a muscle. Every day for maybe 7 years, I’ve written about what I think in detail, and the more I’ve done it, the better I’ve gotten at articulating what is new and interesting and meaningful in my thoughts. There is a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde: “To write well all you need to do is develop your mind. If you have thought deeply, nearly everything looks interesting.” And it really is a lot like that. When I talk to people who have worked with their ideas seriously for 10+ years, it feels like I can throw any topic on them and they’ll have an interesting idea, or if not an idea so at least an unexpected way of approaching it.
Interesting ideas are usually a recombination of things that already exist. You are thinking about a problem and then you remember something from out of leftfield, and when you combine these thoughts, something happens. So the trick is to become the sort of person who makes a lot of useful associations. How do you do that? Richard Hamming writes: