As FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole would say: "DAVID LYNCH DIED THIS WEEK."
I can't claim to be the biggest Lynch buff (I haven't even seen Eraserhead...), but the triangle of strange, playful, and terrifying tones that his work was able to balance has stayed with me since I heard he put a fish in the percolator.
Just last week, my friend Kaylee had shown me this video, where Lynch says (over and over and over and over again) to write down your ideas, because, if you have a great idea and don't write it down, you'll want very strongly to kill yourself.
I love this advice, and I think it works in a few ways:
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You're laying the foundation for what to do if you have a great idea. By having a place to write down ideas, you give them a runway on which to land. Without this runway, you're just as likely to lose a great idea as you are to keep it. And if you lose the idea, as Lynch says, you'll want to blow your brains out.
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You're increasing the sheer volume of ideas that you have, as you begin to inspect a greater percentage of your thoughts and interactions as potential inspiration for your idea list. By increasing your sheer volume of ideas, you're also then increasing your chance of having a great idea. This works like buying lottery tickets - the odds of a great idea may still be one in a million, but by developing this habit of idea generation you are buying more lottery tickets.
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You're also forcing yourself to say that (for now) that idea is complete. This is true even if the idea itself is just a snippet ("Jesus Christ in Detroit", from the most recent note on my phone) - it's a snippet that now exists as one full line on your list of ideas. The benefit of this is that you can then move from the blank-page process of initial ideation and into the process of iterating, growing and nurturing that idea to maturity.
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This finality also creates an incentive to flesh out the idea as much as you can as you write it down. You want to capture the essence of what the idea is, and that means defining and pushing at its boundaries. These boundaries may be small - sometimes it is just a snippet - but "sometimes it's amazing how much comes out." These additional ideas might never have materialized if not through the writing act.
I think what's especially interesting about Lynch's framing, however, is that it paints writing as a reactive act - you are documenting an idea that you already have. This is distinct from another idea that I hear more commonly: that a consistent writing practice as a proactive antidote to not having an idea. Trey Anastasio, for example, talks about the importance of a daily practice of both writing and revising songs; here the emphasis is on forcing yourself to create, and then picking out the gold. On the other hand, at least in these clips, Lynch doesn't talk much about routine, or the frequency of how often you "should" write down ideas. If you didn't have any ideas in the first place, you could take his advice to heart and still end up with a blank page.
I think the truth that unites these two approaches is that we, as people, are constantly having ideas. We're thinking of funny little things all day long! But most of the time we let those ideas float away, because we feel like they are not worth preserving; that they're derivative, or silly, or just not "great" enough. But then, by developing any idea-writing practice - either by establishing a daily routine (like Trey suggests) or by being intentional about capturing the ideas you do notice (like Lynch suggests) - you're acclimatizing to the discomfort of saying "this may be a bad idea, but it is mine." This ownership of your ideas then provides you the space to begin to reflect on where your ideas are currently and grow your creative thinking moving forward.
I have a lot of room for development here. I write notes on my phone, I have a "song journal" that I come back to intermittently, and I record a LOT of bad guitar voice memos, but I still have a lot of (maybe) good ideas that get away. And, if there is one message from Lynch that is certainly clear, it's this: to be a creative person it is critical to take that loss seriously - before someone winds up dead.