Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a big fan of the YouTuber Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach. While most people know him for his various horror Let's Play videos, he is after all known as The King of Five Nights At Freddy's, I really started paying attention to his channel around the time he released his YouTube Original series A Heist With Markiplier. Unlike most series out there Heist takes the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure style story. Each "episode" gives you two choices at the end and your choices decide the course of the story with a total of 31 different possible endings. As a writer, I appreciate the amount of work that it takes to write a story with that much intricacy. I have a hard enough time writing a story with one ending that makes sense, let alone 31. But Heist wasn't his first non-gaming project. Over the years he's made several different creative projects including several one shot sketches, the murder mystery Who Killed Markiplier, and a smaller CYOA type story A Date With Markiplier. The quality and variety of his creative works is amazing and I would love the chance to just sit and talk shop with Mark.
Being relatively new to the fandom, I've been taking the time to go back through the thousands of videos Mark has posted over his time on YouTube starting from the beginning of the channel and working my way up to present day. As of this writing I've made my way from 2012 into 2016, watching as Mark has grown and changed as a creator and I've slowly realized something. Every once in a while I'll be watching a video and something Mark will say about a game, or a silly voice he makes will remind me of something I've seen before; little breadcrumbs through time that upon further inspection all lead me back to one creative project or another of Mark's.
It is the habit of interviewers and fans when speaking with a creator, of any type, to ask them "Where do your ideas come from?" I know it's a question I've wanted to ask many of the creators I look up to. We all seem to be convinced that there's some secret to where these ideas come from. Like there's an idea speakeasy somewhere and we just need someone in the know to give us the password. Creators try to find a way to answer the question and neither they nor the asker seem quite satisfied by the result.
So where do ideas come from?
What I realized watching Mark's older videos is that ideas are made up of our everyday experiences. The things we like and dislike, concepts we're exposed to, bits and pieces of what we see and hear, think and feel. Ideas come from our struggles and triumphs, or defeats. It's no accident that some of the best creators also those who have exposed themselves to the widest array of experiences available to them. We're told to "write what you know" and we take it too literally. You don't have to be an expert on something to create something based on it. Even just being exposed to a concept once adds it to the list of things you "know" exist. Let your mind absorb everything around you. It'll all float around in your subconscious, little bits of existence bumping against each other until they fit in a way you hadn't thought of before.
That's where ideas come from.
