Gather Firewood

David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish deconstructs Lynch’s creative process in a series of somewhat-chronologically-ordered vignettes and reflections. One of the tactics that resonated with me was the notion of "gathering firewood":

"Sound is so important to the feel of a film. To get the right presence for a room, the right feel from the outside, or the right-sounding dialogue is like playing a musical instrument. You have to do a lot of experimenting to get that just right. It usually happens after the film is cut. But I'm always trying to gather what I call "firewood." So I have piles of things I can go to and see if they'll work. You just have to pop on sound in, and you realize right away, Oh, that is not working."

To quote one of my favorite short books, James Webb Young's A Technique for Producing Ideas:

"Of equal importance (to gathering knowledge about a product and its customers) is 'The continual process of gathering of general materials': 'Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested -- from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information... In advertising, an idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people with general knowledge about life and events.'"

This "extensive browsing" is to me a hallmark of the creative personality. Someone who eagerly seeks out fresh input, not necessarily in consideration of a known problem, but out of consideration of how well-stocked the reservoir needs to be whenever it's time to go fishing.

Related: Input —> Output

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