Just Do It
Yesterday I talked about how I organize my ideas. Today, I’m sharing another suggestion I have for not letting ideas slide through your fingers: Act as soon as you can.
It’s not always possible to act on an idea right away. You can’t write a whole novel a few minutes after you’ve had the inspiration. But you can take thorough notes on your vision so it doesn’t fade away. Here are some more reasons to act on an idea as soon as you’ve had it:
Be More Efficient
If you just make brief notes on a topic and go back to it later, you’ll have to reconstruct your entire chain of reasoning in order to rough out that first draft. But if you have a draft to begin with, no matter how incomplete, it will help you develop your ideas without feeling like you’re floundering. But don’t fall into the trap I often do. Sometimes I read the first paragraph of my rough draft and start writing, only to read the rest of the rough draft later and realize I’d already said that. If I handwrite my first draft, then type it as I’m reading it, I’m ready to revise with the draft clearly in mind.
Capture Your Ideas More Vividly
My best thoughts always come before I shift into revising mode. The longer I write when I first have the idea, the more material I have to work with when I start revising. It does me no good to note that I want to write a story about love, if what flashed through my mind was a character who loves her husband but loves it more when he goes away on camping trips each weekend because then she can work on her novel and how she loves him even more when he comes home late on Sunday, his clothes wrinkled and smelling of leaves. As with any writing, the more concrete you can make your note-taking, the more vividly you’ll be able to recall the scene.
Put off Procrastinating
It’s easy to accumulate a file of ideas that you never get back to. If your stockpile is superseded by new, better ideas, then that’s fine. But if all your best ideas are sitting in a drawer, maybe you should start writing before filing them away. By writing as much as you can about an idea, you invest yourself in it, meaning you’ll be more reluctant to tuck it away and forget about it. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. It’s very easy to just bookmark a blog post or a news article with the thought in the back of my head that I should write about that someday. But if I take the time to enter the idea in my to-do list, with a link to the article and some notes about what interested me and what angle I would take, then I’m invested and I’m more likely to come back to it when I’m looking for good topics.
Work Ahead
If your work is deadline-driven, especially if you can create content well ahead of your deadline, do it by all means. I read an article yesterday by Writer’s Digest editor Maria Schneider about the ritual she goes through before writing. In order for her to write, she has to build an atmosphere of nervous tension. If this works for you, then that’s fine, but I need just the opposite. If I procrastinate I get so tense that I have a hard time getting the writing out at all. Yet another reason to act as soon as possible when I get an idea.
Don’t believe you’re doomed if you don’t have time to flesh out an idea the moment you think of it. If you’re already late to pick up your kids from school, don’t pull over and write for fifteen minutes when you get an idea. But maybe before you record that idea in whatever organizing system you use, take a few minutes to flesh out your first hasty notes. You’ll be glad you did when you start working on your first draft.
