I wish I could invent one. The ones that come to me when I'm still half asleep are fairly easy to catch; I can grab them by the tail as I scramble for the pad by my bedside and then tether them to the page in vaguely legible handwriting - which gets less legible by the day, I'm sad to say. No, it's the ones that creep up on me when I'm walking, usually through the park, and which I'm sure I'll remember because they're so beautiful and often fully-formed. The problem is that they too have remarkable powers of evasion and have slipped out of sight, never to be recaptured intact, by the time I get to the tube and can fish out notebook and pen.
Why do ideas creep up on us when we're least expecting them? One minute I'm enjoying watching the children and dogs playing on the grass and the next minute, wham, a scene from a screenplay or the opening line of a short story flits right across my line of vision. It's always slow enough to register but too fast for me to ask it any questions, like 'where did you come from?' or 'how the hell did I get from the bloke tryng to give me the boot camp leaflet to being in a Greek villa in 1979?'
If I do manage to invent one, I'll let you know but in the meantime, maybe I should start carrying a dictaphone with me - or can I record on my mobile? Or maybe I should just spend the rest of my life poised over a blank page, pen in hand. But maybe not. The thing about ideas is that they can't be forced and they love to play hard to get. And the thrill of the chase and then the capture of the few that don't run fast enough are worth the ones that get away.
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