While I never have a shortage of thoughts, I always have a shortage of fingers with which to type. My husband and I were watching television the other day, and after seeing a commercial, I had a fantastic idea for another book. Is this odd? Nope.
As writers, or artists, we are constantly bombarded with inspiration, ideas, and character makeups. At any given point in time you could pick up a manuscript from a writer you're friends with and see some of yourself in there. Everywhere I go I see something, hear something, smell something that begs to be written about. So what to do with all these thoughts? Where to put all of these ideas?
No, seriously, I'm asking you. Where do I put all of them?
I carry a memo pad in my back pocket day in and day out, but that doesn't seem to help organize all my thoughts. I bought a voice recorder, but I used it until it gave up. So, where to put all these thoughts?!
Every book you've read came from an idea that popped in author's head while they were driving/working/napping/showering, etc. These ideas usually come in the form of a "what if". What if there was no such thing as trash pickup? What if a elementary school prodigy created time travel? What if a sheltered teen had telekinetic powers and set the prom on fire? Okay, that last one was from Carrie, but you get the idea.
The next step is fun; we get to daydream and call it a job. I'll sit there and dwell on that idea, embellishing it, putting characters into the scenes, building more of the world. How many times has something happened and your mind ran with it? That's what it's like for writers on a daily basis. Our minds won't let us just see something for what it is. Rather, we see things for what they could be...you know, add in a few vampires, or nymphomaniacs, or whatever. We get to create the world in any way we want.
But there's still that nagging problem...what to do with all the ideas while we're busy working on that one, or in most author's cases, those four stories?!
It's an unsolvable dilemma for writers. So many ideas and so little time. What I do know after 40 years as a freelancer, thousands of articles and a few short stories, plus a couple of books, is write first on the topics that have the most pull. Those topics we're strongly attracted to and have to tell others about them. There's a saying: "You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want." For writers, it could easily be: You can write about anything you want, but not everything you want.
ReplyDeleteOMG...so true.
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