If you’re a writer, do you keep an “Ideas File?” You might have a different name for it, but I’m speaking of a single place where you store ideas for future stories.
The philosopher Socrates opposed writing anything down, whether it was a good story idea or not. He had his reasons, but it occurs to me the world would never have heard of Socrates if his student Plato hadn’t written down much of what the great philosopher said. Similarly, you could trust your memory to retain all the story ideas that occur to you. Or you could type them or write them by hand and store them for later retrieval. It seems obvious that, as writers, we’re not adherents to Socrates’ school of thought in this regard.
It doesn’t matter what form your Ideas File takes, whether it’s an electronic file, a paper one, or a list on a white board. The important attributes are that it’s available to you for storage of new ideas and for later retrieval.
The ideas you store there will likely be based on flashes of insight you get when your mind is otherwise idle; when you’re commuting, or cleaning the house, or taking a shower. These idea sparks can also occur based on reading books, magazines, or newspapers; or from listening to radio or audiobooks; or from watching a movie or TV show. Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games trilogy, said she got the idea for the series’ first novel from the juxtaposition of two TV shows while flipping channels.
The entries in your file can be basic story ideas, plot layouts, character descriptions, images of settings, even just metaphors or clever turns of phrase. The file can contain a combination of all of these. The file can be organized or not; order doesn’t matter until the file gets quite large.
Your attitude toward your Ideas File is important too. Don’t worry if the number of entries grows and grows and you never seem to be using any of the file’s ideas in your stories. Don’t berate yourself if you look back over early ideas and they appear stupid or juvenile. It should give you a good feeling to peruse the file from time to time, especially when you’re stuck for an idea. That’s what it’s for.
Let’s look at things from the point of view of these ideas, the thoughts you’re putting into the file. They each start life in your mind. At that moment you’re enthused about them; they take on a sure-fire, best-seller glow in your mind. You write or type the idea and put it in your folder, only because you are in the middle of another project and can’t flesh this idea into a story right now.
The idea then sits there in your file for a while, maybe years, along with other ideas. It waits there for you to come across it again. When you do, the idea might look worse than it did before, or the same or even better. Sometimes the idea appears to lack something, but combining it with another idea lifts it to greatness. Sometimes a poor idea sparks an unrelated good one, for reasons you may never understand.
As for my own Ideas File…well, there’s little point in telling you anything specific about it. I’ve kept it for decades now and its entries span the spectrum from idiotic to pretty good. If I described my file or its entries, I’m afraid it might cause you to construct your file in some way that doesn’t fit you.
If you’d leave a comment, I’d love to hear about whether you think such an Ideas File would be useful to you. If you already have one, has it helped you? While I await the deluge of comments, I’ll thumb through the files of—
Poseidon’s Scribe
Hi Steve!
I keep an ideas file. It’s a notebook where I date the entry and write down what it is.
Sometimes, I add some context to the entry, for example, I might add what I was doing when the thought occurred. That helps bring back the situation sometimes, when I don’t have time to write the idea.
Lately, I’ve been transcribing some of those ideas into a single idea file, but I’m toying with the idea of a wiki or one of the various taggable note files. My thought is that if I can tag some of the ideas with the same key words, I may be able to combine some of the ideas into one very, interesting story. 😉
Thanks for the great comments, Kelly! I like both notions, adding context to the entry, and making some sort of taggable note file. I may do those myself.