Where do ideas come from? Who does what with them?

Glasses found, on pretty enamel tray: a genius idea

i·de·a

/īˈdēə/

noun: idea; plural noun: ideas; noun: the idea

• a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action. 
• Examples: “The idea of tech bros as world leaders is not good for democracy.” or “The idea of world peace through justice, dignity and love for all has not yet caught on.” 

If you are a pianist mourning the endlessly unjust war in Ukraine, your haunting idea is prompted by personal experience. Vadim Neselovskyi marked four years of war in his home country of Ukraine by composing an evocative suite called “Perseverantia” — an eleven-movement piece for piano and string trio. Listen to him talk about it, with excerpts of the composition, here.

If you are a criminal intent on scamming anyone open to romantic overtures on the internet, your wicked ideas are prompted by greed and corruption. Wired magazine recently ran a series exposing the inside workings of an online ‘romance scam’. Listen to the remarkable story in this interview with the writer here.

If you are an ordinary writer, who writes for the pleasure of it, ideas are either falling out of the sky at a rate of knots or you’re searching desperately for something — anything — to write about. If you are a practiced writer experiencing an idea drought, you reach for a prompt to spark your thinking. Recently, I was with a group of writers who came together to find ideas for writing from among a collection of ephemera — that is, “stuff” that falls out from between the pages of books donated to the local Children's Hospital Book Market. That stuff ranges from grocery receipts to marriage certificates, from ticket stubs to photographs and everything in between and beyond — including passports, love notes, and money. To learn more, listen to an interview here.

A few weeks ago, the idea that got me writing for my monthly “Writing for Pleasure” group was a title: “Things I have Found”. (The other option was “Things I have Lost”; I didn't want to go there.) 

I share the piece that grew from the idea of finding things below. I didn’t stick to just material things found… Over the course of our life, imagine just how many very different types of things could find their way under this title. I limited myself to just six, for the moment.

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THE FOUND LIST

• Myself
• My glasses
• The cat
• My voice
• The car
• Time

Finding myself has taken maybe the longest of all. As a middle child, I needed to extricate myself from between my older sister and younger brother, and I began the process most significantly when I spent almost a full year in France as a nanny right after high school. I left for France not having a clue what to expect and returned having made friends with not only a woman whose family ran a children’s theatre on Cape Code — and where I spent that next summer — but also having made friends with myself. That is, I had experienced the world on my own terms as my own self. No one in France knew either my sister or brother, so I was met as just me on my own terms which I developed in real time. A life-forming ‘find’.

Finding my glasses is a challenge because without my glasses I don't see that well. How does anyone who lives alone find their glasses on their own? I cannot answer that, but I have bought myself a very pretty enamel tray on which I now lay my glasses when they are not on my head. A smart move that has taken me over 50 years to figure out.

The cat is her own being, that’s for sure. And when she doesn't want to be found, she stays hidden. I have written several stories of losing her, each of which has ended happily with finding her — behind the hot water tank, under the front garden shrub, on that blanket in the yoga space that she has never before slept on but has chosen on this day to christen with her scent and her fur. Holly will be 18 in April and she can get lost as often as she wants; I will always find her. If she were a human, I would be prepping to send her to university. That’s a relationship worth the panic I feel when she is lost, not yet found. But I always do find her, and my sigh of relief is always deep.

I found my voice through politics. Not the party kind, but the community kind. I discovered feminism at university and, really, never looked back. As Rebecca West said back in circa 1911, “… people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.” I come from a family of opinion-speakers, so sharing mine came easily to me once I could name what I believe in: equality, justice, dignity. Today, I add to those three pillars: kindness, courage and compassion.

The car. Now that can be a tricky thing to find in among so many other cars in a large parking lot. Or, it was, until that idiot leader-from-below-the-border’s first comments about joining our country to his. I was incensed and immediately bought a small Canadian flag to fly from the car window. I have not taken it off since, and now I can always find the car in any parking lot. That flag, small as it may be, flies strong and true above all the rubbish that continues to come north (and to be exported around the world) from that idiot leader below the border.

Time is a pernicious mistress. Not enough of it and life becomes stressful with too much to do and inadequate room and space to do it all. But too much of it and life can be equally stressful precisely because there is so much of it and I cannot always find the energy to fill it with interesting and productive things. Which is why I appreciate a deadline so much; nothing sharpens my writing mind as much as a deadline and the associated expectation to have something, anything, to share with, for example, my monthly Writing for Pleasure group.

Today falls into the ‘write it now at 7am or have nothing to share by the 7pm deadline’. Well. Here you have it. What that deadline gave me was the fire to put the words onto the page. The six-item list came easily a few days ago, and these 700-or-so words came in a rush this morning. The idea was given, the words I found because I knew you would be here to listen to me read them. That is a gift. Thank you for finding your way into our writing courses and for continuing to find your own writing voice in this special community we are growing together.

Amanda Le Rougetel

February 18, 2026 

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I offer the same thanks to you for being here, dear Reader. With so many words in so many different forms and places for you to read, I do not take for granted that you spend some time with mine. That is a gift I cherish. 🙏 

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.