Ideas and Inspiration

I'll scribble the idea somewhere and go back to my current project. Later I'll come back to the idea. If I still love it, I've got my next project. If it's no longer shiny, I'll trunk it.

If I'm on the computer, I just open up a blank document and jot down the idea. If I'm not at my computer, I scribble in a notebook or on note cards.

I have a folder called 'ideas'. I note stuff down in separate docs there, all sorts, from dreams to random lines of dialogue to basic premises that occur to me (Like Mom, if not at the PC, I scribble it down until I can type it).

Looking at it, I see I have a file called 'peanut butter mountain'. O.O

But I also see several ideas that I went on to use. Not sure about the peanut butter...

I have a Notepad file on my desktop titled "Ideas." I jot them all down in there. If ways to expand those ideas come to me, I go back into the file and add more notes. But I keep working on my WIP so I don't lose momentum. Once I'm done with a WIP, I open up the Ideas file and read through them all -- whichever one grabs me the most is the one I work on next.

I never write it down. If I remember it when I start working on something new, then it's meant to be written. if not, I come up with something else.

It depends on what you define as "children's writing." If I'm working on a novel and a picture book idea nags me, I'll write it. Let's face it, a picture book is 500-words? My novel can chill for an hours worth of writing. But if another novel jumps in, I'll write a tag-line and see if in a month it's still there.

I always, always write down as much as I can as fast as I can. I don't want to risk losing any of it.

Much of my stuff comes from dreams, so when I wake up in the morning, I can open my "Notes and Ideas" document and add another story idea there, whip open a spiral notebook and put it there, or use whatever else I have handy. The key is to write it down because you'll forget it, and sometimes it's really, really good.

A couple of years ago, I woke from my rack in Afghanistan with the wildest, weirdest dream spinning in my mind. I powered my laptop up as fast as I could, churned out about 500 words of everything I could possibly remember as the dream faded, and got up to go to work.

That story turned into what I feel is my first real publishable novel, and it's one of my favorites to this day. If I hadn't written everything down right then and there, I'd have had a couple of foggy ideas and concepts to work with and the novel would have been lost.

I use a regular paper, then when I get to that part, I got threw my papers and write down.

I keep a Bunny Hutch Word doc, where I kennel all ideas as soon as they occur. Whenever I get new thoughts about an idea, I add them to the applicable bunny. If a bunny gets big enough (a couple pages plus), it gets a separate hutch doc of its own.

Bunnies in close quarters tend to interbreed, which often produces compound ideas better than the originals.

When I'm looking to write short stories, I just read through the Bunny Hutch. Something always hops out, ready for further development.

PS: I'm NOT a believer in the "If it's meant to be, you won't forget it" maxim. Writing an idea down and periodically reviewing it spurs the brain to deepen and expand that idea, in my experience.

Do your best to forget all about the new idea. If you can forget it, it isn't worth remembering, no matter how good you think it is right now. If you can't forget it, if it sticks around in your mind no matter how hard you try to forget it, then it will be worth writing when the time comes.

If it's actually worth remembering, your brain will continue to work on it. It'll go in and out of the swamp muck at the bottom of your subconscious, and come back up changed each time. It simply works.

Not that I think any idea is good or bad. Some ideas are simply good or bad for a particular writer.