An Idea Saved Isn’t an Idea Earned

One of the things I’ve gotten over since I started writing (I think this came in as either the second or third Big Writing Revelation(tm)) is saving ideas. At a certain point in the writer’s life, you realize that you’re creating crap, but that you have to go through that woodland crap to get to the glade of good words. And then like blue jays screaming through the woods come these gleaming moments of non-crap and you need to decide what to do. Now, this new stuff is good, having handled crap for long enough you know when ideas and words have that different feel to them. The new stuff fits into what you’re working on, but the rest of what that work is crap and you know it. Do you put these chunks of gleam into the crap making the gleam craptapulous or do you hoard your gleam until you get better and that gleam can shine with the other shinola you’d be producing then?

And the young writer, like a pack-rat dragon wondering when he’ll get his next hit of gold-plated meth, will think “I’ll hoard the gleaming things until the pile will shine forever.”

Resist this behavior. With all your might, resist. The only idea that shouldn’t be put into the story you’re writing is the idea that doesn’t fit. You can’t horde the good words, they don’t behave like that. And ideas, if hoarded, grow stale and die, losing their gleam. Then they begin to stink. The bright leaves flare and fade into the forest floor.

Here’s the secret though, just because you use it once doesn’t mean you can’t use it again. So throw that idea, or those words, into the big pile of crap that is the story. You might have to scoop them out later when you’re killing your darlings, or they might impart some shine to the rest of the load. They may even inspire you to polish up the rest of it. Who knows, it might make the story successful. Even if it does help your story get published, that still doesn’t mean you can’t use it later.

And if you stop the flow of gleaming ideas by hoarding them, then you get idea constipation. And the ex-lax for that condition isn’t any fun at all and ranks right up there with a unicorn enema. So roam through your woods plopping out the craptastic and the shinola with great glee and abandon. Soon you’ll see more shinola than crap. And eventually you’ll get to the editing point where you’ll be cutting the crap out instead of the gleaming parts to make the writing smooth.

Ideas work better when they can rub up against other ideas in a story. Keeping them herded off doesn’t help anybody.