The Unclear Inspiration Syndrome
Once upon a time one of my best friends had their period and a lot of pain. I decided I would make a soup to soothe the evil menstruation demons. Menstruation is strongly associated with red, so I decided to only use red ingredients. I felt extremely inspired to put my idea to the test and help my friend.
I grabbed anything red I could get my hands on. Three packs of crushed tomatoes, a couple of actual tomatoes, a dash of red bell pepper, and some chili powder. This stew didn’t soothe the demons, or our appetites (it made for a good laugh though).
This was a case of Unclear Inspiration Syndrome. Too much of the same. Yet, not quite the same.
Inspiration comes in two forms
One of the core skills of a creator is to take inspirations and combine them in unexpected ways. Kinda like a chef.
When you combine inspirations, you form an idea.
Inspiration + Inspiration = An idea.
But just as with cooking, you can’t toss any mix of ingredients into the pot and expect something yummy.
As I see it there are two types of inspiration.
Contextual inspiration is the way something looks, where it takes place, and who or what the characters are.
Fundamental inspiration is the underlying reason(s) for the idea to exist. It could be an emotion, to solve a problem, or to communicate an idea.
Look at this pot I prepared, I put some context inspiration in it.
Big dragon + Vampires + Fantasy land like Tolkien + A hero = A world.
That’s a world simmering! We could keep chucking more contextual inspiration in there. But looks like it could go on forever. It’s because worlds can grow infinitely big.
Let’s add a pinch of fundamental inspiration now.
Previous ingredients + Put yourself in other people’s shoes = Now you can see what might happen.
It’s starting to smell good! And it’s more nutritious.
Contextual Inspiration + Fundamental Inspiration = A nutritious idea.
You get more oomph with at least one of each inspiration type.
Only having context is kinda like having a pot full of spices. It’s just powder. It gets stuck in your nose hairs if you try to smell it. But at the same time, few dishes can go without any spices at all. It’s what makes food edible.
You need both types of inspiration to make a nutritious meal. Otherwise, you might end up with a menstruation soup that doesn’t even do its job.
Unclear Inspiration Syndrome is when you only have contextual inspiration.
Why we choose ideas that don’t blend
Hayao Miyazaki once asked one of his new apprentices to draw him a person who’s eating. The apprentice proudly handed over a beautifully rendered drawing of a man eating by a table.
“Do you have no idea how people eat!?” Miyazaki erupted. “You must have seen this every day of your life. Do you never look?”
The man in the drawing was sitting tightly pressed between the table and the chair. It was an unnatural position for eating that nobody would go into willingly. Despite the artist’s skills, the drawing didn’t feel believable.
Let’s look at what happened.
Table + Man + Chair + Food + Fork + Eating = A scene.
There are A LOT of ways this assembly of contextual ingredients could blend. The man could lie on the table and eat the food from the chair, technically it would still be “someone eating.” The artist’s rendition wasn’t that bananas. But something was amiss in the recipe.
Previous ingredients + A memory of someone eating = A real moment.
By recalling how a friend would sit by the lunch table in school, the artist added that touch of reality that was missing. This artist had focused so much on perfecting his understanding of anatomy and rendering that he didn’t consider the thing that are less visible. Human behavior.
Let me tell you about someone who got confused about his ingredients.
George Lucas had many sources of inspiration when he set out to make Star Wars. Like James Bond, Lawrence of Arabia, Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress, Flash Gordon, 2001 A Space Odyssey, and more. He had a massive vision.
It took a long time for the script to click. He said the story didn’t fall into place until he noticed something within the project that was also true by looking at his inspirations. They were all following the journey of a hero leaving home, going on an adventure, and coming back changed.
When he realized this he compared Star Wars’ story to the steps of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey. Which gave him the clarity to fill in the missing gaps.
Among all his inspirations George Lucas had managed to find a common denominator. Perhaps his instinct had led him to pick contextual inspiration that shared the same fundamental idea.
Star Wars recipe:
Ingredients
James Bond
Lawrence of Arabia
Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress
Flash Gordon
2001 A Space Odyssey
Instructions
Mix all your inspirations in a pot
Crank up the heat
Let boil until you have reduced to a fine blend of contextual and fundamental inspiration
Give it a good stir until it starts to look like an idea
That’s Unclear Inspiration Syndrome and my home remedy against it.
What something fundamental really is
The Heroes’ Journey is a great example of something fundamental. The reason it helped save the story of Star Wars, was because The Heroes’ Journey is a cycle that represents the way of life. That’s why stories that make good use of it work so well.
Every type of project needs something fundamental. Different types of projects require different types of fundamental inspiration though.
A product needs to fix a problem that actually exists.
A video game needs to evoke a sensation that you can relate to.
Art needs to evoke the way things feel.
Fundamental inspiration always has its roots in reality.
Our instincts lead us to pick fundamental inspirations, even if they appear to be contextual at first. When we first experienced the sources of those contextual inspirations we were probably touched deeply. But with time we forget. The contextual traits become shortcuts in our brains to convey the real idea they were originally attached to. We associate the context with brilliance and we forget what’s fundamental.
I have been through this in reverse.
Before ever reading my favorite comic as a kid I thought it looked a bit ugly, and not very cool, maybe because I hadn’t seen anything like it before. My impression of it didn’t excite me at all. But in another comic series that I read, there was a snippet of my to-be favorite comic.
I ended up buying every volume I could afford. I got obsessed with it and started imitating the art.
The context didn’t mean anything to me until I got a taste of its fundamental qualities. The art in itself wasn’t enough to make me feel inspired until I had experienced it in its fundamental context (pirates and a specific type of romance).
Cook with love.
