Readers don’t ask me where I get my ideas that often, in the grand scheme. In my more self-aggrandizing moments, I like to imagine they look at my ideas and run screaming. What’s more likely is that the people I talk shop with tend to have already tried writing. As a result, they’ve had a chance to figure out that having ideas is far easier than crafting them into stories. Perhaps they already know that the real bind is having ten great concepts and knowing you won’t get to them all, certainly not before you’ve had a thousand more.
Ideas can, in fact, be very easy, especially once you’ve had some practice.
Don’t believe me? Try this. It’s not a new exercise, certainly not unique to me, but a few times now, I’ve decided on a new project by making a list of every single thing I could think of to write next. These were long lists, numbering twenty-five, even fifty items. The lists included simple and perhaps questionable ideas (“Macbeth in Spaaaace!”) and complicated, unworkable ones. They had pure romances and hard SF concepts based on articles I’d read in anthologies like The Best American Science and Nature Writing
Even if you are pretty sure you know what you’re going to work on next, there’s value in embarking on this type of quick sift through the idea basket.
Why? First, it plugs you directly into the fun of writing. There are few things more gratifying than the pure untrammeled glee of creation, of playing with your subconscious, your muse, your writerbrain… whatever you care to call it. Thinking about what you might write is like the part of your birthday where you get to open your gifts and count up the loot, but haven’t yet moved on to discovering that one of the sweaters doesn’t fit, or that some of the boxes say Some Assembly Required or Protagonist Not Included.
A wide-ranging and uncritical exploration of possible writing projects creates a collage of the inside of your mind. It gives you a good picture of where you’re at artistically and emotionally, what you are interested in exploring, the psychological and thematic terrain you may want to cover. These insights can, in turn, inform the idea you eventually choose, whether they initially seem like the heart of the matter or not. When you generate dozens of possible ideas for novels, some of them are sure to overlap. If there are three stories in your long list that center on lost kids, or unrequited love, or people grappling with their parents’ health issues (or any common element) it may be a hint that you’re ready to dig into that material.
A long list of everything you might write might just as easily contain a couple variations on stories you’ve done before, giving you an opportunity to evaluate that impulse to cover old ground… to decide if you’re taking on something that might be comparatively unchallenging. The list should have a few things that are so ambitious they feel well beyond your current reach. One hopes, finally, that there will be a couple oddball concepts in the mix, glimmers of silliness or lunacy, peculiar possible experiments.
Finally, once you go through them, the long list of everything you might write should turn up a few things you are desperate to work on. Ideas so compelling that the thought of shelving all but one of them is painful. Bright, challenging, cool and above all exciting… that’s the one you’re looking for.
(And what if you can’t narrow it down? What if there isn’t one obvious contender… what do you consider when choosing between a small group of obvious winners? That’s a subject for another essay… so stay tuned.)
Every time you commit to a writing project, you’re simultaneously deciding to not write ten or twenty or a hundred other things. Having a look at the opportunity cost, before you start, can help ensure that you are making the highest and best use of your precious writing time.
, by Stephen Greenblatt
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