I did this backwards I guess. The idea for a cartoon or whatever tends to come before the script and storyboards unless you are taking a heroic amount of drugs or your anti-drug is an entire handle of rum in one sitting.

Tim? How do you come up with your ideas?

That is something I hear hundreds of times a day… always from myself when I can’t think of something to write. Most people who email me questions about the cartoons are more concerned with quoting me, calling me “random”, or asking me how to pirate software.

I get most of my ideas for cartoons from the following places:

• Really stupid conversations with friends. It would be great if all my ideas popped out of a vacuum, but that can be a lot harder than it is worth. Sure some friends seeing your work could be like “hey that’s totally just a conversation we had months ago”. Hopefully, your entire audience isn’t just one person. Don’t forget to thank that person in your work.
• “Improving” other ideas. You know when you armchair quarterback some movie, tv show, comic, or whatever? Instead of just bitching about it, why not take the idea you thought would make the original better and use it as a framework for an original idea. I’m not saying just copy a bunch of other movies and books and give it a new name… unless you call it Eragon and want to make a lot of money. When I do the e-cards, I sometimes go to the card store for inspiration and look for cards I hate and try to figure out how I would fix/ruin them.
• Lack of sleep can give me some weird ideas, and a few times I’ve had to roll out of bed while I was drifting off to jot down some notes. I don’t want to say keep a journal by your bed, but if you spend a lot of time thinking about dumb stuff before drifting off to sleep, it may be a good idea.

Now all that said, I am making it up as I go along. My degrees are in visual arts and animation and not creative writing. My biggest suggestion to animators (especially students) out there is if writing something good is proving impossible then stop. Stop wasting your time. Don’t risk toiling over animating some half baked crap script. Find someone who can write or try to adapt a preexisting short story.

Leave a comment if you have any other suggestions for coming up with ideas.