Well, it’s NaNo season again, and as such I’m going to give you all some unsolicited writing advice. I don’t know about all of you, but I have horrible impulse control, and a lot of fun story ideas. For a long time, the result of this was droves upon droves of partially started books. “Ooh, what about this story?” So I started it. “This seems like a neat concept.” And I started it. The result being a lot of “I started this based off of a half-formed concept and don’t know where to go with it, but I have now jumped from the train of thought of my other story and don’t know how to get back” situations.
The solution to this was, surprisingly, really simple. I made a concept document! Now, I just type up notes in my “Write it down!” doc and get back to it when I have the time. This means that I’m not rushing to come up with a full plot for a single piece of dialogue or a vague idea, but I also don’t feel like I’m abandoning them. I can keep expanding on the possibilities, knowing that when I get to them, that work will pay off, but also that I don’t have to have all of the details in my head. For someone who had previously done little writing down the things I needed to remember, preferring to just, well, remember them, it was a bit of a difficult transition to make, but it’s certainly been worth it.
A good example of what I couldn’t have done had I mentally catalogued the ideas instead is actually this year’s NaNo. I was working on another story, see, and it wasn’t until partway through October that I realized we were almost to this time of year again. Not wanting to come up with a new concept with such little time, I turned to my concept doc. If I had been trying to remember all of them and find the most fleshed-out idea to use, I probably still would have ended up choosing the story I did, but I would have misplaced some of its details. I also wouldn’t have been choosing from the full eleven choices that I had written down, because I wouldn’t have remembered what all of them were at any given time. I say this with full confidence, seeing as I just tried to remember all eleven (I cheated; I already have the number from counting them in my doc) and could only recall seven of them.
Anyways, just a friendly suggestion: write down your ideas! That might seem obvious, but for me it wasn’t, so I’m going to assume there are other folks like me who need the nudge.
