Ideas

I keep meaning to have more non-writerly posts (or, you know, just more posts in general), but then I think no one wants to hear about my mild-yet-mysterious foot pain, or how everyone at the grocery store smells and stands in front of the milk right when I need it, or what a success it was making gravy with TWO packets instead of one the other night. SNORE.

So anyway, today I thought I’d talk about where ideas come from. Because this is something that non-writers often ask, expecting it to be something cool. Possibly even a Sekrit. And sometimes I can pinpoint the exact moment an idea really came to me, and that can be cool. But usually it’s not so glamorous or exciting.

Usually coming up with ideas is a matter of sitting down at the computer and typing until something makes sense. Which sometimes doesn’t take long at all, and sometimes takes days. Sometimes I hit on something I want to work on right away, but usually it takes a couple days of typing out nonsense to get a feel for what I might work on. And then it takes more nonsense after that to refine the idea and figure things out. If I let this process only go on in my head, not on the keyboard, then it could take months for an idea to properly form and will be pretty undeveloped. Not that there’s never any point where I’m only thinking about potential stories, not hashing things out on the computer, but it’s not how work gets done.

I think everyone has their own methods for how they get the work done, but in my case what generally works for me is sitting down and working the keyboard until some sort of order appears in the chaos. Then I outline it. It’s not glamorous or awe inspiring, but it works.