I’ve said before that not everyone can make a webcomic. Oh, plenty of people say they could make one if they wanted to. They say they’ve got loads of ideas, and all they have to do is put them together and post them. Only they don’t actually put them together and post them. Because that’s the hard part – actually doing the work. Coming up with the ideas is the easy bit.
This is not to denigrate the generation of ideas. That can be tricky if you’re not used to how your own creative juices flow and to capturing those fleeting thoughts we all have dozens of times a day. There is a skill involved in that. But the point is that if you’re tuned in to your idea generation engine (i.e. your imagination), then you can generate lots of ideas pretty easily.
Olaf Solstrand is in the middle of posting 100 ideas in 100 days on his blog. Not any old ideas. Ideas for webcomics. A hundred different ideas for webcomics. Some of them are so good that I want to run out and do them. Except I don’t have the time.
If you’re sitting there thinking you could do a webcomic, grab one of Olaf’s ideas and run with it. No, seriously. I’d like to see some of those turned into comics. There are ideas in abundance. What we lack is the time and resources needed to make them into finished products.
This is the lament of creative people.
Tags: idea
(Funny coincidence: I’ve spent the last week or so reading the entire archives of Irregular Webcomic, something I have put off for years. And when I finally get around to doing it, I suddenly find you commenting my blog? Huh. Strange.)
Thanks for the mention! It may not need saying, but I agree with you: Doing the work is the hard part. Coming up with the ideas? Meh, not that big a challenge, especially as long as it’s one idea you need and not a hundred like I do. Everybody is capable of getting ideas, and everybody do get ideas. Tons of them, most likely. I admire everybody who manage to pick up one of those ideas and do something about it.
Of course, as you wrote in your previous post here, what’s a good idea and what’s a bad idea depends on the person reading it. And it’s also depending on the person or organization realizing the idea. For example, there are many Pixar movies with plots I’m convinced would have been horrible if they’d been made by any other movie studio. Take Cars: A movie about Nascar racing? I hate the idea, but I love the movie.
I’m happy to see you think that some of my ideas are good (feel free to inform me about which ones). Comments like this one encourages me to keep going. I hope people follow your suggestion so that some of these ideas may come to life one day. I plan to try getting around to realizing most of them myself this fall, but obviously, realizing a hundred ideas would mean that I wouldn’t have time to do more than a couple of strips for each idea. And that probably won’t really do the ideas justice… So I strongly encourage people to steal my ideas, too.
(Apologies for all typos and grammatical errors you happen to in this comment. It’s the whole not-my-native-language-thing.)