Ian McMillan: Why great ideas will come to those who wait

Suddenly the expression on my face changes dramatically. I look simultaneously quizzical and profound like a baby who is about to fill a nappy. A special camera of the kind that hasn’t been invented yet would show a light bulb going on over my head. I begin to run, or what constitutes a run in my universe. I move as quickly as I can across the grass to the house; I rush in and pick up my notebook. I look round for a pen, find one in the inside pocket of my jacket and scribble something in the notebook. I stand and exhale. I smile. I go and put the kettle on. I know what I’m going to write about in my column. All is well with the world.

What you’ve just witnessed is the gestation of an idea. I find that I can’t force ideas; like a fisherman, I just have to cast my net over the side and wait for an idea to come swimming by and then I can gently haul it in. Sometimes the tailfin of an idea briefly floats across my brain and I’m too eager. I clumsily lunge for the idea and it escapes and all I can remember is that I had an idea and that, of course, it was a good one and possibly the best one ever. All I can do is sit and wait for the next one to appear. Of course I have to have several ideas a week, because I have to write several things a week, but I know that they’ll come. I trust that they’ll come. I hope against hope that they’ll come. My mate Tony Husband is a cartoonist and he has to have several ideas a day and they have to be funny and, like me, he doesn’t panic.

He knows they’re there somewhere. I take the rubbish to the bin. He takes his dog for a walk. We’re like men at the bus stop studying the timetable, gazing down the road and looking at our watches, knowing that a bus usually comes at this time and that means the odds are it’ll come in a minute. Except that ideas adhere to no timetable. A bit like some buses. I remember once being the foyer of a business somewhere in the West Riding and a flipchart by the lift announced “Ideas Meeting 10.30 Room 32”. I should have gone.

In Yorkshire we’ve always been good at ideas. There was Joseph Priestley from Birstall who discovered oxygen, Halifax’s Percy Shaw who invented cats’ eyes, and Leeds’s own Joseph Aspdin who came up with Portland Cement, if that’s what you do with cement. I wonder how the ideas came to those distinguished gentlemen? Was it a lightbulb moment or the culmination of hours spent hunched over papers at a table?

Percy Shaw is supposed to have had his Eureka moment either after seeing tramlines on the road or a real cat’s eyes glinting in the hedge and I guess that proves that you have to be receptive to ideas, you have to get yourself into a state of readiness. I often quote the Yorkshire author Jack Higgins who said that writers are working hard even when they’re looking out of the window. It’s true. I’m just working myself up into a state of receptivity.

The thing about ideas is what you do with them. I know that I have to convert my ideas into sentences that will inform, educate and entertain. Percy Shaw wanted to prevent deaths on the road. Joseph Aspdin wanted stronger and more durable cement.

Some people have ideas and then think that idea-robbers nick them instantly and stick them in a swag bag. Years ago a bloke used to come to my writing workshops who was convinced he’d had the idea for the TV series Bonanza and that it had been stolen when he left it on the back seat of the Rotherham bus. I tried to convince him that US entertainment executives didn’t often travel on that particular service but he wasn’t having any of it.

So the conclusion is: ideas are valuable. When you have them, rejoice. Look after them. Treat them well. Yorkshire can be a hotbed of ideas and those ideas will lead us to a shining future. A hot bed, eh? Now that’s an idea for the winter months! All I have to do is come up with an idea for a heating system that won’t set the mattress on fire. No rush. It’ll come.