Unworkable Ideas

Thomas Edison was supposedly asked by a journalist about his many failed attempts to invent the light bulb. “I have not failed,” he responded. “I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” The nice thing about inventing light bulbs is that you know when your latest iteration doesn’t work. Either the thing lights up and stays lit or it doesn’t. What’s more, the connection between idea and result is unmistakable. While Edison may not yet have known how to make a working light bulb after his 5,000th try, he did know without a doubt that the reason that version didn’t work was because of that idea.

I suppose you could say that each of the first 10,000 versions of a light bulb were broken since they didn’t work. But broken is a word best applied to a finished product. Edison was inventing, was discovering – a process, no matter how long or short, that always involves ideas that are tried and abandoned. Writers try and abandon many ideas called sentences and scenes in the process of discovering their stories. The unfinished story isn’t broken; it’s working version just hasn’t been found.

People will sometimes speak with tenderness about their own brokenness and the brokenness of those they love. Everyone struggles, after all; everyone is afraid and everyone fails and everyone feels lost and uncertain. Let’s not judge these weakness, these cracks in our personhood; let’s admit we all have them and be kind and compassionate to one another.

I do not believe in broken people. I do believe, however, in ideas that don’t work. I have had many such ideas in my life, ideas like, “I must be successful to be happy,” or, “No one listens to me unless I’m depressed or angry.” The difference between these ideas and Edison’s failed attempts to invent a light bulb is that the connection between my ideas and the life I’m leading is rarely obvious to me. In fact, I’m usually quite certain that there’s no connection whatsoever. My ideas are inside of me, and the rest of life is outside of me. I can see no thread between these two realities.

Until I write, of course. Then the thread between my thoughts and the ideas on the page is as clear as the ink coming out of a pen. It has been the hardest lesson to learn that if there’s something in my life I don’t want, it didn’t arrive by accident any more than a sentence appeared in my story of its volition. Just as my stories get better as I remove the sentences that don’t belong in it, so too the conditions of my life have improved as I have recognized and abandoned the many ideas I’ve held that simply don’t work – that light nothing, move nothing, and say nothing except, “Have pity on me, for I have suffered life’s indifferent injustice.”

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com