ideas suck

I have a lot more ideas when I'm nowhere near the computer, or any other writing tools for that matter, than I do when I'm sitting in front of it. This regardless of whether I'm thinking about story ideas or not. (The ideas aren't all for stories. Some of them are blogs.)

Someone reassure me this is normal, please?

Comments

[Daring Deux]

Thinking is easy. Transforming thoughts into words is hard.

Something you can do is get a basic program on a mobile device that allows you to transcribe your ideas wherever you might have them for further examination later. I try to keep a journal on me when I'm out and about just in case such an emergency happens.

[toafan]

2546709
I wonder if such a thing is available for the 3DS. Surely it must be.

Actually, I've got a digital voice recorder, as a separate device. It's full. I don't remember how much I've ever taken off it. That's the problem with such things: you do have to get back to them eventually. My notebook fills up, but I don't know how much of what I've put in I've actually attempted to do something with.

I saw today, in The Optimist magazine, a review of a book about walking as, I don't know, a thinking aid is probably the best way to put it. Basically, walking is good for your thinking, and lots of more-or-less famous people -- thinkers -- have been walkers. Which jives with what I'm complaining about, but doesn't help solve anything.

Maybe I want something like Google Glass, except without all the internet junk, with a real keyboard so I can thrash out ideas when I have them and can ignore it when I don't need it.

[Daring Deux]

2550418

Doing things with what you write is not necessary, and if you feel that you have to do something with every scrap you write down, you'll only be needlessly burdening yourself at best.

I actually keep a gdoc filled with random scraps that I delete from stories I'm working on. I don't plan on using any of—that's why it's there—but every once in a while I go through it and I see things I might be able to use on the story I'm working on in the present.

Beyond that, if you specifically want to use something you've transcribed while out-and-about, make the time to do so the next time you sit down to write. If you constantly keep it manageable, you'll never feel like it's a waste.

And if your notebook fills up, you can just take a new notebook. Something you can do is leave room for a table-of-contents sort of thing in the front of your journals. You can attempt to organize it a bit. What I do in my journal is I have a section dedicated to story ideas starting on one page, and then I allot a certain chunk of pages towards that end, and then I move on and have sections for specific ideas I want to flesh out further, and another section for more mundane musings. You could also try those sticky-note type bookmarks you can dog-tag your journal with to mark important parts you want to remember the location of.

Just some ideas.

[toafan]

2550467
New notebook, ha! I've done that numerous times in the past year. I've got a stack of them. They're waiting for me to (nominally) go through them and smash them into something resembling an organized stack. You know, where I can actually find "oh, where's that bit about X?" They're all eclectic with whatever happened to be running through my head.

I'm a big proponent of googlifying things and making them so they can be accessed with the internet. I'm just sidetracked by privacy concerns and having no idea how to approach it at the kind of budget I'd have.

[Daring Deux]

2556646

I suppose you could feasibly set up a gdocs system using bookmarks (which allows you to search for and set links to points in a doc), while also allowing you the privacy to control who can see it and who cannot. The only issue is if you still consider that "private," but I figure that if you want it online, you'll have to make that concession. This also still requires that you re-type it all and then categorize it, which sounds like a huge bother. But, hey. The option is there.

This really sounds like something you have to be proactive with, though. You can't let it build up like that, or it will never see the light of day.