This is how a fire actually starts for me. You throw out a spark, a loose half-formed thing, and you watch whether it sparks another one. Then you yes-and that one. You keep chaining sparks until a line connects that is both realistic and pointed at where you’re trying to go. That line is the fire. Everything before it was just kindling.
When I’m at my best, that’s the whole move. Turning sparks into other sparks. Most of mine are scattered and a lot of them go nowhere, and that’s fine, that’s the cost of the method.
What’s been missing isn’t the sparks. It’s the thing that holds them long enough to connect. A spark that lands somewhere it can catch is an idea. A spark that lands on nothing is just a nice thing I said once and lost.
Where do your best ideas die, in the spark itself, or in the gap before the next one connects?