Don Hahn - Brain Storm

Its ten oclock at night. My parents are in the living room howling at Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, and Ive secretly smuggled a flashlight into bed. Maybe that doesnt sound like big-city excitement, but at five years old, well, it was a treat. Id sneak under the covers with a flashlight from the kitchen drawer and pajama bottoms stuffed with green plastic army men. When the lights went out, Id flip on the flashlight and reenact the allied invasion of Normandy beneath the sheets for what seemed like hours.

When I got bored with that, Id punch some holes in a piece of tinfoil and put it over the flashlight, securing it with a rubber band from that mornings newspaper. Suddenly my room was a planetarium, full of stars and constellations. The Big Dipper was way up there next to my toy monster collection, and the North Star burned brightly just above my sock drawer. I once smuggled a giant colander from the kitchen in my pajama bottoms to my bedroom. With a flashlight and that colander, I could re-create the entire Milky Way galaxy on my ceiling. I didnt think my mom suspected a thing, but in retrospect, Im sure she just shook her head and said, Your son has the colander in his pants again. Dad probably snorted a proud snort and went back to Andy Griffith.

Sometimes I would prop the flashlight up on my bookshelf and try making silhouettes on the wall. I could do a passable barking dog, a butterfly, and a bust of Lincoln, but the big crowd-pleaser was a lifelike silhouette of Marilyn Monroe smoking a pipe, a feat that I must say was not unimpressive.

It was about this time that I had my first encounter with the movies. My mom and dad would make some popcorn, dress my brother and sister and me in our jammies, and load us into the back of our pink Rambler station wagon, and wed head off to the Rosecrans Drive-In for a double bill: One Hundred and One Dalmatians and one of those Doug McClure movies titled Journey to Somewhere Underground with Big Rubber Dinosaurs or the like.

After wed found our perfect parking place and hung the high-fidelity speaker on my dads window, wed eat popcorn and play Twister, waiting for the show to begin. And then it was showtime. All the lights in the drive-in went out, the kids at the big playground underneath the screen ran back to their cars, and a beacon of light beamed through the darkness from the snack-bar roof onto what appeared to be the biggest white rectangle in the Western Hemisphere. The first image that night was of a quartet of animated snacks delivering a snappy jingle touting the tasty treats available inside.

I was mesmerized. Sure, I had watched television, but the difference between watching Andy Griffith and Barney Fife on a sixteen-inch black-and-white TV screen and watching a dancing hot dog on that huge white rectangle was lifetransforming. This was better than my flashlight and colander. Much better. I became glued to the light in the darkness. There I was with my family in a station wagon parked near two hundred other cars on a hot Saturday night. There were other kids with their families, older couples, horny teenagers, and pimply-faced snack-bar attendants all staring at the light in the darkness. (Or was it pimply-faced teenagers and horny snack-bar attendants? Oh, well, you get the idea.)

Im not an anthropologist, but it seemed to my five-year-old brain that I was experiencing a primal joy as I stared at this light in the darkness. It was probably the same joy cavemen experienced from staring at a campfire in the frigid void of nightexcept without the giant dancing hot dog part.

Three hours, two features, and seven cans of RC Cola later, I was hooked on movies, and I had to go to the bathroom in a profound way. I was too young to understand the concept of a double bill, and for years I wanted to go back to see that movie againthe one with the dalmatians, dinosaurs, and the big hot dog. Staring at the big rectangle would be the most amazing fun I would have in the back of a station wagon for years to come.

The foundation of creative thinking is formed from three critical elements. First, you need a huge amount of information. Fortunately we are alive in the middle of the biggest information boom since the invention of movable type five hundred years ago. Modern media is everywhere, and the ability to get information on the Internet has put nearly every man, woman, and child in contact not only with the 1,644,009 entries listed when you type in the words Kim Kardashian, but also with the greatest thinkers and libraries known to humankind.

Second, you need an untiring interest in your work. Are you obsessed enough with your ideas to play with them into the dead of nightto turn things over in your head and play with the problems of your craft just because thats what you love to do? You need the passion to bring loads and loads of raw material to consciousness for consideration.

And finally, you must have not only the ability, but also the ruthlessness to take out the trash. Nobody can think of only good ideas or write only touching, sensitive prose all the time. If weve done our creative work effectively, first weve done our homework; next, weve created tons of fodder for thought; and finally, weve weeded through our thoughts, separating the rocks from the gems, always mindful that time changes things and todays rock might be tomorrows gem.

Sadly, there is no National Bureau of Good Taste, no sole arbiter of good and bad ideas. That choice between the good idea and the bad one is up to you. Its a very personal choice, tooas personal as the friends you keep, the clothes you wear, and the food you choose to eat.

Choosing between the junk and the genius is called your taste or your gut. Its that still-small voice inside you that whispers in your ear, This really stinks or This aint bad. You may not be able to articulate completely why an idea is gold or tinmost likely you will feel the distinction. That gut feeling is part of your DNA, combined with your life experiences and the exposure youve had to a world full of ideas. But that gut feeling is a changing organism that grows with you on lifes journeys.

Creativity beckons us to jump into the voidto shine a light into the darkness and risk following a new idea. You may find a good idea today that will seem half-baked tomorrow. You may discard an idea that comes back years later to haunt you. You may even create something that society tells you is total folly and then be seen by generations to come as genius.

Lets take a ridiculously broad perspective and consider for a moment where exactly we fit in the universe. The universe is basically a bunch of stars and planets floating around in a big black void, as previously illustrated on my bedroom ceiling. In that universe there is a galaxy, and in that galaxy a star, and orbiting that star is Earth, and resting on Earth is a highly sensitive, intuitive being prone to horrific acts of violence and unbelievable acts of kindness: