A friend and I reflect that the ability to translate an idea from your sphere of art into someone else’s is one test of how good the idea is. And that often it gets better, or more interesting, in the translation. He says this is the same as with intellectual ideas, that if you can explain them between disciplines, they are strengthened. I know it helps me to try to tell him what I’m thinking. It’s hard, but worth the effort.

What would an idea be that you couldn’t explain to someone else? Would there be value in cultivating such ideas, so specific to genre (or self) that they couldn’t be moved?