I currently have, among my works-in-progress, several novels. A couple of them aren’t even just novels; each instead is the tip of an epic, convoluted, series-length tale which may or may not already have the far-off ending worked out to poetic perfection in my head.
For some reason, small-scale stories don’t work well for me. I’m long-winded, for one thing. For another thing, I write slowly, so I have lots of time to come up with more and more ideas before I type “The End”, and these ideas blow the story up bigger and bigger like so many puffs of air in a balloon.
As a result, I end up working with the same characters, the same world, the same (convoluted) plots and subplots for months on end, desperately trying to get to The End and call Draft 1 Finished. Sometimes I get stuck. Sometimes I put it down for too long and have trouble getting back into it, even though I’m ready to keep working toward The End. So to get back into the writing groove, I want to write something a little lighter, a little shorter. And if I don’t have anything handy to work on, I pull out the Idea Box.
My Idea Box isn’t actually a box; it’s a folder. Well, two folders, now that I’ve gotten myself more organized; two hanging file folders labeled “Fantasy Ideas” and “Sci-Fi Ideas”, with newspaper articles and torn-out notebook pages and scribbled-on napkins tucked away into them. It’s a way to collect the random new story ideas that come to me, and put them someplace where I can pick them up and rifle through them whenever I need something new to work on.
If you’re a writer, I hope you have an Idea Box. How do you keep yours? Digitized on your computer? In a journal? Scrapbook-style? (I’ve never been able to get into scrapbooking, although I appreciate other people’s work in the field.)
If you don’t have an Idea Box of your own, maybe you can use a random plot generator to start one. Or use it to brainstorm some new ideas if your Idea Box needs a refresher. I think mine does…excuse me… *click click*
