How to have an abundance of ideas at your finger tips
Sometimes things pop into my head… words, phrases, ideas.
As a writer I realised long ago that ideas rarely arrive when requested, they’re more skittish than that.
Rather than fight this, I capture ideas as they fly by. I do this is by jotting these words, phrases, quotes and thoughts on scraps of paper as soon as they occur.
If I don’t – my job/adult children/mother/best friends/life/shopping list/housework or whatever – replaces my tiny idea as a far more pressing matter.
So I jot down my idea on the back of a napkin or in a note pad at work or a little scrap of paper and then it’s safe for me to forget that little idea.
When I get home, I put the piece of paper in a box and when I need inspiration I go to the box and pick out a handful of scraps of paper and read them. Some ideas genuinely surprise me. Sometimes I have completely forgotten I made the note but reading it brings the idea, and the memory associated with it, flooding back.
I once had an idea for a story. I went to the box and found three words on three bits of paper that I had jotted down because I loved the way they sounded. Those three words, that I had written so long ago, became the story. (When that book is published I’ll update this blog).
My son told me the rapper Eminem does a similar thing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4hr0Q-x-QNM.
If I don’t capture them, they get away. If I don’t write them down, a short time later I can’t remember what I thought was such a good idea. I also like the sound of the pen scratching the page as I write.
The benefit for me is I always have ideas on hand. When I was writing the first draft of my 100,000 word manuscript, I would sit down to write my 1,000 words every day, sometimes holding a scrap of paper with one word on it, or a sentence or a phrase or an idea.
When I didn’t have a clue what to write that day, I would rummage through a stack of ideas and something would jump out at me and I would run with it.
Having an ideas lucky dip is an endless source of inspiration when you’re looking for ideas for articles, blogs and stories.
