Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
A reader named Henson asks:
“I wonder why the question “where do you get your ideas from?” is asked so often?”
We authors are so often asked the source of our ideas because because no one knows the source, not even authors.
What we do is no more magical and supernatural than a cobbler making shoes.
We see an image or ideal in our mind, we gather our raw materials, and use innate talent or trained skills to turn that material into a reflection of that ideal.
But the ideal shoe has no power to pull on the human imagination like a magnet, and the ideal of other lives, other souls, other worlds, all do.
People can be spellbound by poets. Not even poets know why.
I do not know why, albeit I suspect that the answer is that the ideal of the soul of man is the image and likeness of God. The ideal lives in a world parallel to ours, touching it only in the minds of rational creatures, otherwise hidden. It is supernatural.
The moment you can look at a pair of shoes, and see the pair as a supernatural thing, a thing no merely natural or merely material beast could make, and see the wonder of the hand of man in the shoe, and the hand of God in the man, you will know from where we get our ideas.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
