Yesterday, Write Stuff asked readers, “When do you write?” The ideal answer was “always,” meaning that when a writer is away from her keyboard or notebook, she is still writing in the back of her mind.

Although I didn’t think to answer “always” to the question, the post struck a chord. Most of my best ideas have developed when I first wrote down an idea, then later did some freewriting to explore its possibilities, then let the idea hang on the tree in the back of my mind until it was ripe and ready. When the same idea comes back again and again, each time with richer possibilities, I know it’s a good idea.

I’m reminded of what Orson Scott Card said in How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy:

“Good stories don’t come from trying to write a story the moment I think of the first idea. All but a handful of stories have come from combining two completely unrelated ideas that have been following their own tracks through my imagination. And all the stories I was still proud of six months after writing them have come from ideas that ripened for many months—usually years—between the time I first thought of them and the time they were ready to put into a story.”

It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t let some of my ideas ripen a little longer before plucking them. Or if perhaps I should revisit some of the stories I wrote as a kid. They’re horrible, of course, but some of the ideas still come back to me after all this time. Maybe there was something there after all, something that could be combined with some of my newer ideas. I think it’s worth a look through the archives.

The old cliche to “write what you know” doesn’t really mean that if you’re a teacher, all your characters should be teachers, or that if you were born in the Midwest all your stories should take place there. It means you should write out of your experience of the world and human emotion. In this sense, all of us are always gathering material for our stories.

What about you? Are you always writing?

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