Ideas

We all probably have tons of ideas: some we've never started working on, some successful ones and some that failed. So, what were those ideas?

“Christian in a Secular World”- A 13 year old girl is faced with pain and suffering but stands strong in Christ, leading her family to Jesus.

“Cool Fool”- two friends, Meg and Jackie, are struggling to keep their friendship when peer pressure pulls them apart.

“Elisabeth”- 8 year old Elisabeth lives on a farm and looses her mom.

“England Orphan Twins”-twin girls are orphaned in England and find themselves on a ship to America


“Integrity Boarding School”- 8th graders Allegra, Kindra “Kindie”, Sophia, and Mica are attending a boarding school.

“Orphan Hopes”- Susanna is an abused orphan who gets adopted by a large Christian family.

“Orphanage”- A girl’s parents die when she is a baby and by the time she is 13, her grandmother dies and she is forced to live in an orphanage.

“Piper and the Blizzard”- A misunderstood non Christian girl runs away from her family, gets caught in a Blizzard, rescued by a Christian couple, and changes her ways.

“Slave Sisters”- An abolitionist 13 year old girl takes her slave that she got for her birthday and runs away, taking her friend to freedom.

“Christmas Story”- a girl named Noelle and her older sister are orphaned and homeless on Christmas.

“Tillie and Billie”- Tillie and Billie are twins born half an hour apart. Tillie on Sept. 30 and Billie on Oct. 1. When they go to sign up for kindergarten, they find that Billie was born too late. This is a double diary of Tillie and Billie and their struggles.

“The Good Sin”- A German girl and her twin brother’s diary of their life with Hitler in power. She is torn between telling the truth and saving a Jewish family’s life.

I never have any ideas that I've "Abandoned". They've only been put aside temporarily until I learn enough to go back to them.

Which ones of yours did you feel didn't work?

Ideas.

Ideas just don't work this way for me. I don't keep lists of ideas, and I don't keep a memory log of ideas. Ideas just aren't important enough to even think about, let alone remember.

Ideas come and go, and I don't even try to remember them. More often than not, I don;t even have an idea when I sit down to write a story, and I don't look for one.
I don't even want one.

Re: Ideas.

Interesting take.
Recently I've found myself with a great idea and before I could write it down, another idea came along and said, "Phooey! Who needs that idea?"
"What idea?"
"Exactly."

Scatter-brained and distracted, coherence eludes him like a high-noon shadow and it's going to snow for at least another six weeks. Cuckoo!

First, write it down.

Yes, writing it down would make sense. I only write things down when I am starting a writing project. It's just so I don't forget something, though.

My notes are usually just a name, or a word or two to give me a reminder clue.

I have a real problem with fiction, though. Can't stand reading it, don't know if I can write it. For instance, a story about orphaned children in WW2 sounds interesting to me, until I realize somebody who didn't live through it is writing the story. Perhaps if you interviewed someone who did?

It's just me. Anyone else out there have a hard time liking fiction?

Re: First, write it down.

It's just me. Anyone else out there have a hard time liking fiction?

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Good Lord, no. If I had a hard time liking fiction the last thing on earth I'd try to be is a writer.

Re: First, write it down.

I know a handful of people who hate and would never read fiction. They think the world is such a fascinating place full of things to learn and people to know, how bother reading something that is made up.

Funny thing is they all love movies.

Go figure.

Re: First, write it down.

I know a handful of people who hate and would never read fiction.

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I've met a few such people myself. I don't want to know them.

Re: First, write it down.

“Christian in a Secular World”- A 13 year old girl is faced with pain and suffering but stands strong in Christ, leading her family to Jesus.

“Cool Fool”- two friends, Meg and Jackie, are struggling to keep their friendship when peer pressure pulls them apart.

“Elisabeth”- 8 year old Elisabeth lives on a farm and looses her mom.



“England Orphan Twins”-twin girls are orphaned in England and find themselves on a ship to America


“Integrity Boarding School”- 8th graders Allegra, Kindra “Kindie”, Sophia, and Mica are attending a boarding school.

“Orphan Hopes”- Susanna is an abused orphan who gets adopted by a large Christian family.

“Orphanage”- A girl’s parents die when she is a baby and by the time she is 13, her grandmother dies and she is forced to live in an orphanage.

“Piper and the Blizzard”- A misunderstood non Christian girl runs away from her family, gets caught in a Blizzard, rescued by a Christian couple, and changes her ways.

“Slave Sisters”- An abolitionist 13 year old girl takes her slave that she got for her birthday and runs away, taking her friend to freedom.

“Christmas Story”- a girl named Noelle and her older sister are orphaned and homeless on Christmas.

A young man once told Einstein he always carried a notebook, so that, whenever he thought of a good idea, he could write it down. Einstein responded, "That wouldn't be too useful for me. I don't have that many good ideas."

I think you're making too much of "ideas" as important in your work. Ideas are easy. Everyone has good ideas. My six-year old nephew is bubbling over with interesting ideas. Artists don't have a monopoly of ideas - what they do have is more skill in making art out of them. In your case, putting them down on paper. Work on that.

"We all probably have tons of ideas: some we've never started working on, some successful ones and some that failed. So, what were those ideas?

“Christian in a Secular World”- A 13 year old girl is faced with pain and suffering but stands strong in Christ, leading her family to Jesus.

“Cool Fool”- two friends, Meg and Jackie, are struggling to keep their friendship when peer pressure pulls them apart.

“Elisabeth”- 8 year old Elisabeth lives on a farm and looses her mom.

“England Orphan Twins”-twin girls are orphaned in England and find themselves on a ship to America


“Integrity Boarding School”- 8th graders Allegra, Kindra “Kindie”, Sophia, and Mica are attending a boarding school.

“Orphan Hopes”- Susanna is an abused orphan who gets adopted by a large Christian family.

“Orphanage”- A girl’s parents die when she is a baby and by the time she is 13, her grandmother dies and she is forced to live in an orphanage.

“Piper and the Blizzard”- A misunderstood non Christian girl runs away from her family, gets caught in a Blizzard, rescued by a Christian couple, and changes her ways.

“Slave Sisters”- An abolitionist 13 year old girl takes her slave that she got for her birthday and runs away, taking her friend to freedom.

“Christmas Story”- a girl named Noelle and her older sister are orphaned and homeless on Christmas.

“Tillie and Billie”- Tillie and Billie are twins born half an hour apart. Tillie on Sept. 30 and Billie on Oct. 1. When they go to sign up for kindergarten, they find that Billie was born too late. This is a double diary of Tillie and Billie and their struggles.

“The Good Sin”- A German girl and her twin brother’s diary of their life with Hitler in power. She is torn between telling the truth and saving a Jewish family’s life."


No disrespect, but thank god none of these ever got written! Although most of them already have been, many times.

No disrespect, but thank god none of these ever got written! Although most of them already have been, many times.

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To the contrary, each and every one of these would make a wonderful novel. And will, thank God, many more times to come.

Actually, I have worked on most of them. I haven't sent anything out to anyone though.

Ideas come to us all the time... that's what files or note books or computers or voice recorders are for.

The question you need to ask yourself: which one you're the most passionate about? The most fun to write? The most exciting? Which one you're obsessing with right now?

My best beloved high school English/Creative Writing teacher told us about a writer who, whenever he got one of those Ideas but no time or inclination to dive into it just yet, would jot it down on a scrap of paper and put it in his "demonbox". Later, when he needed an idea for a new story, he'd open up the box and pull one out at random.

I'm all in favor of this, and I keep a computerized version of it on my main writing zip disk (and backups). On most computers I use, there's a My Documents subfolder called "demonbox" or "musebucket". Some days I pull a tarot card, start describing the card, and end up in a new story. Other times I get a single line: "Today a raven arrived to repair our roof." "The geese are walking on water." The short story whose crappy damn first draft (slightly less crappy than the abhorrent babble draft it grew from) started as a sentence scribbled on a post-it note at the office.

All I need to do is script myself a little program to choose a file from that directory at random, to simulate pulling a scrap of paper out of the box. Maybe I'll port it up to a protected directory at littlebull.com and make a MySQL/PHP widget. Ooh. Maybe make it not protected, interactive, and let random people put stuff in and pull stuff out! Oooooh.

Now. Who was the author with the demonbox? The meme appears to have escaped and propagated madly, because a Google search turns up much of interest but nothing definitive.