People who are creative tend to use the right side of their brain, that’s the part that can think outside the box and dream up an entire novel after seeing a tattered purse lying near the neighbor’s yard. It also happens to be the side of the brain that is disheveled, tousled, and unkempt. It’s like a backpack on the last day of school, stuffed to the brim with twisted and wrinkled papers, old nametags that have fuzz stuck to the once before sticky part, broken pieces of crayon and pencil, candy from the holiday party several months ago, and many other surprising, yet treasured items that haven’t been seen for months.
Imagine all that helter-skelter in your head, and then trying to get in out on paper, or if you’re at work, a random sticky note or the back of your hand. Or if you’re at a restaurant, your napkin, your friend’s napkin, and then napkin of the unobservant man at the next table (possible future blog post- how to secretly slip napkins off tables when you’re desperate for paper for your fantastic idea).
Writers have all sorts of ideas and we tend to lose them due to the overflowing backpack that spills from our brains, to our hands, to anywhere we can jot a quick note. Then that note gets lost, or when we look at it again it suddenly makes no sense what-so-ever. I have a note to self about my novel that says, “In case of emergency, read, wipe, and burn.” To this day, I don’t know where it came from, and where I was going with it. It’s truly devastating because I’m convinced that there was a brilliant idea there that would change the world as we know it, and now it is lost for forever. Oh well.
In all seriousness, I’m not sure if all writers are really this bad, but if you are a writer, chances are you have lost a notebook or an important sticky note with a great idea, and somehow it feels like you will never recreate it the same way ever again. I’ve lost a few very important notebooks to me, in fact cried over said notebooks, because they were filled with stories I liked, years of research, and little notes about everything you could imagine. At first it feels like a tragedy, but then you find a way to rewrite, rebuild, and keep on going.
There are a few things that help me stay a little more organized as a writer, so I can at least attempt to keep track of my ideas.
1) Have a designated place for all writing material. For me it’s a shelf holding all of my notebooks, some boxes to throw notes in, and a basket filled with pens, sticky notes, and more note cards filled with ideas. True to my right brain, it is disorderly with notebooks strewn here and there and papers falling on the floor, but it keeps everything mostly together, and I try to clean it once every few years.
2) The envelope file system. This may not work for everyone, but it has sure helped me to collect my ideas. I put the working title of my novel idea on the front of an envelope, and then anytime I get an idea for it, whether it be a description, a name for something, or a character’s line, I write it on whatever I have available and then shove it in the envelope when I get home. Whenever I’m ready to start that novel, I pull out the envelope, flip through the ideas, and start building my outline.
3) Idea Log- this was recently sent to me from my nanowrimo writing friend and I am in love with it! It is a notebook that is small and light enough to fit into my purse or go bag for the day, it has a place for a pen, and plenty of pages for lots of ideas!
I really loved the intro in the log book. How true! Hopefully if you're as scatterbrained as I am these ideas help you out!
