I don’t understand probably half of the things David Lynch says or writes. However, when a nugget of decipherable truth cuts through the riddles, one must listen and learn from the brilliant mind that brought us Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.

It’s a strange start for a column devoted to literary endeavours – admittedly so. But the warning David Lynch sermonises is as relevant to a master of the screen as it is to a prophet of the page. Choosing his words carefully, he says, “if a person forgets an idea that they love, it’s a horror…” Pausing at this moment to squeeze his eyes shut (presumably in sheer turmoil at this unthinkable prospect) and weighing his next words deliberately, he elaborates: “and it could lead to a real yearning to commit suicide.”

Hyperbole? Hopefully. Consider next what Stephen King, that great American storyteller, said about writing ideas down (spoiler – it’s almost the complete opposite to Lynch). King proposed that writing ideas down would only serve to immortalise the bad ones, and that, instead, ideas represented something akin to breadcrumbs in the sieve of one’s brain. Good ideas are big enough that they stick around, while bad ideas are filtered away easily.

So, who can we believe? The visionary director of Mulholland Drive, or the man who has infected our nightmares for the past fifty years? Tough call.

“Good ideas are big enough that they stick around, while bad ideas are filtered away easily”

In truth, the greatest novels are a result of both approaches. Some ideas are born fully formed, requiring immediate, feverish attention from their writer, while others undergo a gestation period of months or even years.

Equus (1973), by playwright Peter Shaffer, falls into the former camp. Shaffer (an alumnus of this fine University) was inspired to write this utterly perverse tale after hearing of a seventeen year-old boy in the north of England who’d inexplicably blinded six horses. This crime served as the immediate launch point for Shaffer’s work about psychosexual and religious obsession. A child psychologist going through his personal issues is faced with the disturbing task of analysing the boy, producing a phantasmagorical exploration of passion under repression. All this from a true crime headline – go figure.

By contrast, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) was formed from a concept that had followed the writer for many years. Ishiguro told the Guardian that the narrator Kathy H had been with him for a while, along with the setting of 1970s England and the foreboding sense of destiny that awaited the characters. The crucial and ironic thing, of course, was that he wasn’t sure what this ominous destiny was to be. Retrieving from his mind-sieve this long-held breadcrumb of an idea, Ishiguro developed one of the best dystopian novels in recent memory. The less one knows about the lives of narrator Kathy H and her friends, the better. Safe to say that, in articulating this idea of his, Ishiguro passed this haunting idea on to us, the reader.

“In reality, the writer is not in charge, but is instead just the vessel”

And then somewhere in the middle, you have those books that are the perfect marriage of both a strike of inspiration and a nagging concept. We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003) by Lionel Shriver is one of the most powerful novels I’ve read, with the most sickening, undulating force pulsating under the surface. Shriver has described how the idea for her work came from recurrent questions she was asking herself as she turned forty about why she was reluctant to have children. Like a wobbly and rotting tooth she played with the taboo around childlessness. What was she afraid of? Her answer was in part articulated in the horrendous cruelty displayed at Columbine High School in 1999. Shriver has said that she’d already started to work on Kevin before the tragedy, but there’s no doubt her work took on a post-Columbine inflexion – not least in its direction of plot. The result is a chilling study of the frightening notion that, in essence, when a woman becomes a mother, she gives birth to a stranger.

And so it seems that to try and systematise a way of wrangling and domesticating ideas would be a fruitless endeavour. In reality, the writer is not in charge, but is instead just the vessel through which these ideas – when and if they want to come to fruition – make themselves known to us. Accept your lack of control over the comings and goings of ideas and try to resist that ‘real yearning’ that Lynch talks about. Ideas are also a little like buses: if you miss one, there’ll be another in five minutes.