Are you guys really the same guy, posting under different pseudo-names? Come on now, fess up ....

Ideas find you, sometimes, when you're not looking that hard for them. Like stray kitties you find on the porch, insisting on coming into the house.

If searching hard for ideas isn't working for you, try easing back a bit, and see if the ideas start sleeping on your back porch.

...certainly not from writing to an advice columnist!

Forget about working hard looking for ideas....good ideas don't come to people who sit all by themselves on a desert island/deserted apartment screwing up their eyes to help them think real hard. Good ideas come to people who encounter and participate in Life.

I mean this kindly....Get A Life. Get to know a wide variety of people and do a wide variety of things. Work hard at it, lose yourself in it, and in a little while you'll have something worth writing about.

If not, all you'll have to write about is how you really really want to be a writer but you don't have anything interesting to say. Not something I'd bother to read!

I have the opposite problem. "I have a head full of ideas that are driving me insane," as Bob Dylan said. I just don't really know how to make them into structured writing. Maybe me and the LW should hook up, you know?

In the meantime tho, Cary is right -- for this guy, it's prob more about selling than coming up with a new angle. Didn't someone once say there are only 5 different plots?

BTW Cary, my neighbor rides his dirtbike thru my father-in-law's property every nite and "dad" is bipolar and afraid the neighbor will find his meth lab, his only source of income, so he wants me to tell my best friend -- because he's sleeping with her -- to tell the neighbor to knock it off. I want to help out but I also don't want to jeopardize my full scholarship to Yale. How can I quit having panic attacks?

Dear Cary,

I was intrigued by the recent letter from the writer who lamented not having seemingly enough ideas to market as a free lance journalist. I pondered this notion as something akin to what looks to me as an insatiable need in our contemporary culture to outwit, outsmart, and outsource everyone and everything to get the most juice out of the coconut for being on top of it and ahead of the curve. Dear letter writer, ideas are everywhere, as Cary also proposed, simply talk to your neighbors, friends, other writers for garnering your nuggets, and mostly think about it and write! I believe we tend to believe we have failed if the ideas seem too plebian or without an edge even when the ideas being projected currently are often suspiciously packaged to please commercial interests in the final layout. Have we forgotten to spend time doing the work of introspection from a place that matters and finding writers to read who are honed in on some truly germane ideas for illuminating our process and seeding our gardens? There are many opinions growing like vile weeds in our print world yet get passed off as legitimate commentary simply because a byline is attached and this becomes a kind marketable piece of cocktail hour repartee and passed around as genuine gems of élan writing however trite and clichéd it may be and yes, I’ll dare say it, accepted as cutting edge opinion of this or that even though when boiled down is likely commercial hogwash! It seems the more money that goes into a product these days – including magazines, books, films, television programming, newspapers, certain journalists or writers make a point on commenting and extolling upon these trendy realities but genuine exploration of such for what it is worth is limited because no one wants to offend the publisher or the producer or the gulible public at large for fear of losing a fickle market of people who sometimes seem to me to be caught up in illusionary perceptions of what is truly savvy and salient for the sake of having an appearance of keeping up with main stream culture, (witness therein the “American Idol” television mania) and our cultural lust for being entertained rather than cultivating our own imaginations and being creative ourselves, which must include doing some fine tuning to find satisfying journalism, and other forms of media output). I’m thinking about all the recent favorable fawning over the film “Sex and the City” and went only to see what fans of this television series were swooning over…I was not impressed. The shallowness and predictability of this “let’s play dolls’ script scenario from many of our growing up female in the good ole USA without even very interesting scenes of New York or actual people living there included in the viewing, but more disturbingly to me was nary a thoughtful or deeper response to any thing of real significance in our complicated world is ever discussed by these four fashion “Barbie” dolls or am I the only one who is delusional and out of it as I suspected the audience might actually be at my local Bay Area movie theatre…as ripples of disbelief resonated throughout my body when I heard the many giggles and chuckles from the audience in clear adoration while I sat there stone cold sober as an outsider to this fantasy and having difficulty relating to this kind of viewing of my humanity going on inside the frame. Well, you know, with brand name New York fashion designers making the decisions for how the women are supposed to look and feel and dozens of shoes in Ms. Bradshaw’s closet costing hundreds of dollars each and the Mexico beach scene depicting Cynthia Nixon’s character as gross because her pubic hair is exposed while sunbathing in her bikini without her having ‘waxed’ first or especially in my mind for its quantifying women’s libidos these days as objective fodder(a thinly veiled sexism is masked I declare throughout this movie and pretending to be liberated female expression with its naughty but nice celebration of female libido as a fashion statement looking tasty and desirable from the outside and only on occasion does this film present some genuine moments of female tenderness, vulnerability or angst in these matters, notwithstanding how these females are also portrayed in roles of being equally sexist to their male counter-including Samantha giving up fidelity for lust as though it were a better brand choice for making her happy and so it goes --throughout the mostly flippant, glib with raunchy dialogue that the writers pass off as reflective of contemporary women’s sexuality issues. Where is the passion? The movie is considered light entertainment - so who am I to question the goods (female libido) therein displayed and seemingly being marketed like tawdry cologne to our main stream culture for the price of giving up your mind. What else is new – give it to me raw and straight without a chaser, honey! But we must be herded in and compelled to dream the so-called American dream of having it all, especially if it’s fashionable and clean, without pubic hair showing except for laughs, and costs a lot of money, as Sarah Jessica Parker wants us all to believe!

I’m not suggesting that the writer of the letter is without depth or thoughtfulness or originality but I am saying the moment we want to give up the journey for getting to the summit first we have missed the mark. The journey of seeking what truly matters to oneself and is worth the price of admission (our minds and sensibilities) for others to consider without it needing to fit into a schematic of commercial value – is from my point of view worth the creative journey just to see how it plays out.

Think about it…

Dancing on the Edge...