L.A. Garnett – Author

Part of being a writer, to whatever extent that may be true for you, is listening to your ideas and giving them a voice. Everyone has hundreds, thousands, of thoughts a day. Generating ideas isn’t this difficult part about being creative. It may start out small, with 2-3 “ideas” a day, but once you start to truly listen to what your mind is throwing at you, anyone can generate at least 5-10 ideas each day. They may not all be good or even possible, but they are something that made you go “wow, that’d be interesting”. The truly challenging part of writing is having the wherewithal to allow an idea to mature into something more tangible that you can bring to life. This takes time, effort, and no small amount of trust in your own abilities.

The first way I like to start my process is by recording every idea. Nothing is too small or too off the wall to be written down. I’ve been through a few methods for this but right now I’m using Capacities, a program I recently found that allows you to create a network of objects (which can be anything you want: notes, tasks, ideas, projects you are working on, people you work with) so that every connected item can be tagged or linked to one another. This lets me keep all my ideas together in some way and when I go to look through my notes, I can easily find what I’m looking for, and anything that might be related. For simplicity’s sake, everything I jot down for writing is tagged with “prompt” so that when I’m looking for inspiration later on I can go back and scroll through my board of good (and bad) ideas.

Here’s a small selection of some of the thoughts I’ve jotted down over the years:

1. Doppelganger -“the ghost of someone who is still alive” (a quote paraphrased from Jordan Peele regarding Us)
2. Horror short story inspired by Hansel and Gretel – witch who is successful in stealing and eating children
3. A CEO’s fall from grace and the people who are dragged down with them
4. Novel about an asylum inspired by Nellie Brown
5. Deep sea vampires

Not all of these are good or actionable and very few will actually become written outlines or drafts. But through the news and daily life so many potentially inspiring things cross my mind, and the ones that stick get recorded.

Once they are in this note, I simply let them live there. I trust that my tagging system will let me find that idea once I’m looking for a bit of inspiration. Now that it has a page to live in I can go back any time that it comes to mind – I tend to daydream, and if I think of an interesting direction for that initial prompt to go in I like to go back and make a timestamped note of it. That way I have a progression of thought and I can see the true evolution of the idea from initial concept to where I am now.

It’s that developmental stage of letting the ideas simmer in the back of your mind that is so important to writing. Very few people have a stellar novel fully formed in their mind right out the gate. Most writers will need to think it through a few times before they are ready to commit themselves to putting words to a page, be that for the first draft or the outline. There are some people that go years without writing a single word but because they’ve been mulling it over for that time, once they do sit down to write it just flows.

Everyone’s process is different. I’m amazed by the people who can commit to an idea right off the bat and run with it – my mind simply doesn’t work that way. I need that space to allow the idea to develop into something a bit more robust than “hey, what if…”.

If you’re interested in how I record my notes I love talking about note-taking platforms. I’ve tried them all at this point so while I’m no expert, I certainly have a few opinions on the matter. Let me know in the comments if that’s something you’d like to hear about!