The Fountain of Inspiration

One of the most common questions fiction writers face (after “you’re not quitting your day job, are you?”) is the question of where we get our ideas. It’s a question that has always frustrated me because the answer is complicated, and also because the question is somewhat broken.

The question “where do you get your ideas?” takes as a premise that ideas come from a magical somewhere, a distant island of misfit toys that’s accessible only to those of us weird/broken/creative/talented enough to make the journey. When people pose the question, it sometimes feels like they expect a simple answer, such as: “I bought my ideas at Craig’s Idea Depot” or “I get them organic from the Farmer’s Market every other Tuesday”.

Hate to disappoint you here: there is no known concrete place where writers go to get their ideas. Sorry. Similarly, there’s no quantifiable chain of events — spiritual, chemical, sexual, emotional, or otherwise — that generates a writer from the aether. It’s true that a substantial number of moody undergraduates have attempted a sort of creative parthenogenesis by emulating the substance abuse patterns and depressive attitudes of writers like Poe, Thomas, and Hemingway, but these student writers (usually men) are more often making asses of themselves than inspiring themselves… and they consistently fall a great deal short of inspiring anyone else.

On the plus side, despite its murky origins, writing gets produced regularly. Writing is often good, occasionally it is great, and — on days when Mercury isn’t retrograde and the stars are playing nice — writing can be inimitable, the kind of prose that emits a frequency capable of shaking the human soul. And no matter how we split hairs, someone creates this writing, and they do it somehow.

Nowadays, we have to approach the question of where writing comes from a little differently. Silicon Valley has taken a (literally) brainless approach to language composition, arguing in favor of linguistic stochasm — the idea that even if language isn’t generated randomly, we can model it that way. While this may be accurate in the technical sense, the tech CEOs out there (at least one of whom can’t even install Windows, by the way) have taken it a step further, claiming that randomly modeled language is in some way equivalent to genuine language.

This is obvious stupidity for a number of reasons, the biggest of which is that language is, at its most basic level, communication from sentient being to sentient being. Computers are not sentient. Computers will never be sentient. Even if we achieve highly complex AI systems that argue for their own sentience, they will only be doing so because of the code that was initially written into them, full stop.

It turns out, computers don’t do anything outside of their code base. Even a computer that could adapt and model its own code base still wouldn’t “want” anything, unless a pretense of want was coded in. Computer behavior is driven not by biology or psychology, but by carefully typed glyphs in a terminal. If we wanted to understand the behavior of a computer, we wouldn’t use stochastic principles, because creating new models of randomness would be less effective than simply reading the code. Human deployments of language are complex and require stochasm to mimic. Computer deployments of language are stochastic models themselves, and they can be mimicked using Ctrl-C.

So when we ask where writing comes from, we can rule out complex models of randomness, which LLMs use to simulate writing. Writing might not come from the island of misfit toys, but it also doesn’t come from unpredictable shifts in kismet, and it sure as hell doesn’t come from Sam Altman. Writing — by which I mean authentic communication — comes from a place no computer can reach: authentic need.

Rhetoricians have a word for this need: they call it “exigence”. It’s an umbrella term used to describe the entire set of contexts and circumstances from which rhetoric is born. In terms of rhetorical theory, writing is a response. Something happens (or doesn’t happen), and as a result, hundreds of thousands of Composition 1 students flock to their nearest word processor to write argumentative essays. Rhetoric understood this way is both a cause and an effect, and writing is the thread of human conversations that document our reactions to our circumstances and to each other.

I’d like to argue that creative writing is not so different, maybe not different at all in any way that matters. The writer internalizes something, and that something demands a response. In political rhetoric, the politics determine the stimuli. There’s a version of the piece you’re reading now that could have been written entirely because I had a reaction to Altman’s “stochastic parrot” tweet, or because I read an essay that talked about that tweet. Both of those things are true, but they’re incomplete without the creative side of my writing life.

In my writing, especially my creative fiction, the stimuli I’m responding to has a potent aesthetic component. It’s something that bots can’t grasp, and which can be hard to explain to non-writers if they aren’t especially Romantic people. My fiction is “about” the fog I drove through in Southern Idaho as much as it’s about human trauma. It’s “about” the feeling I get when I look into deep water as much as it’s about people who face the things that haunt them. This essay is as much about language as it is about the sunset over Sanibel Harbor, which is simultaneously blinding me and delighting me as I type.

Henry James spoke to the aesthetic-need origin of writing in a piece of advice he gave to writers who were learning their craft: “try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost”. This lossless philosophy is potent advice, because it encourages writers to join in the conversation, not just of humankind, but of the whole world — sometimes even the entire cosmos, for writers of religion and science. A writer who sees everything and learns everything is a writer who can write anything, not because they’re omniscient but because they have been spoken to by the universe and they have a biological imperative to speak back.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way; the Romantic English poets regularly wrote about the aesthetic pressures that inspired their writing. There are countless examples of this, but Wordsworth’s two-book Prelude is my favorite. In the beginning of this lengthy biographical poem, he speaks to the Derwent River, which ran near his hometown:

“Oh Derwent, travelling over the green plains
Near my “sweet birthplace”, didst thou, beauteous stream,
Make ceaseless music through the night and day,
Which with its steady cadence tempering
Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me
Among the fretful dwellings of mankind
A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm
Which Nature breathes among the fields and groves?”

Some people might argue that Wordsworth is being saccharine, and that he’s poetic beyond the bounds of practical philosophy. I disagree. I do not believe it is an exaggeration to suggest that the Derwent composed Wordsworth’s thoughts any more than I believe it is an exaggeration to believe that an eruption of flame would cause a panicked person to yell “fire”.

So, to summarize: it is my opinion that writing, especially creative fictive writing, is a direct response to social, political, and aesthetic stimuli that impress an authentic need to communicate on people who are paying very close attention to the world around them. This origin is not easy to trace, nor is it random — and though stochastic models can maybe fake it, they fall irredeemably short of the real thing.

Of course, if I ever get asked in a television interview where my ideas come from, I’m not going to adopt a dewy, distant look in my eyes and say “from my natural commerce with the world”. I’ll probably put it into more conversational words, if I can. But as I’m writing now, I think my most likely response to this question on-air would be to stand up from the $4000 armchair the TV studio has shoved me into, walk to the host, grip them by the shoulders and ask with the sincerity of a man who feels he is going mad:

“Where do my ideas come from? First tell me: where did your ideas go?” ♥