Ideas Won't Keep.

It was too good an idea. It had to be tried.

Years ago, I scrawled a quotation in the corner of one of my journals, then highlighted it in yellow. I have since found the originator of the quote, Alfred North Whitehead (English philosopher and mathematician, 1861-1947). I'd like to thank him here, formally, for saying in few words something that is a driving force in the lives of many creative people.

"Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them."

 You know the feeling. It's the one that wakes you up in the middle of the night, keeps you fidgeting, annoying the person trying to sleep beside you, until you write it down. In the morning you'll find a cryptic note on the bedside table: 'DOG WALLOWING!' or 'mustard in the seams'.Sometimes, the idea doesn't let you get back to sleep until you've actually completed the darn thing. (One morning I woke up to find ten typed pages of a story outline sitting on my desk, and had no memory of doing it.)

Fantastic things, ideas. Who knows what intoxicated demon is responsible for gleefully dropping them into our heads two minutes after lights out? Creative people hate it when it's around, but we despair when the demon disappears, inexplicably, for days (or weeks!) on end.

So thank you, Mr. Whitehead, for putting the relationship we have with our ideas into such a simple phrase. And a big thank you, too, to the cheeky, cherub-faced demon who put it in you.

And so the demon Idea takes another victim.