Fairyhedgehog posted about avid reading on her blog. The post is HERE. I commented on the post, bragging about my ability to come up with thousands of story ideas - without actually having written them.
Now I find myself wondering how much of an exaggeration - or minimization - that was. How many story ideas do I come up with in a day anyway? Not how many do I write. Writing a story can take ten, twenty or even a hundred times as long as reading it.
But last year I managed to write a lot. Including poems (which in my case are very short stories) I wrote 111 projects, finishing 97. That's about a story idea every four days. But how many ideas do I actually come up with? And coming up with ideas - does it prove anything? What?
I think I may begin a journal of story ideas I come up with this year. Since it looks like I'm not going to be able to write nearly as much as I desire I will be regulated to imagination only. It's a fun place to be, but it's hard to revisit ideas and enjoy them the same as before.
And should I include story ideas I have that I haven't started? How do I go about tracking this I wonder? I have no misgivings whatsoever about predicting at least 500 story ideas over the course of a year. I might even be able to double that. Talk about bold, huh? But coming up with an idea is easy. Writing it is HARD. Time consuming. It's hard for the work to keep up with the ideas. And when better ideas show up work often stops.
How about you? Do you come up with a lot of ideas - but fail to actually write them? How many do you get? How many do you actually try to write?
Sailors on the Sea
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
I come up with zillions of ideas. The thing is, though, that you don't really know which are keepers and which are seed ideas or which are the duds that will never go anywhere...until you write them.
and sometimes they breed in the dark recesses of your mind, hybridizing into something strange and wonderful.
Yeah. That's kind of the way it is with me, too. In my head they all seem quite delightful. But some are quite difficult to write while others seem to pour like water from an ewer.
You both have far more ideas than I do, but I'm learning to notice what ideas I do have more, and let them have more of a free rein.
I'd love them to breed in the dark recesses of my mind! That's a wonderful phrase, ww.
That is what they do: breed. I think maybe they're like rabbits. The more you have the more you have.
"The more you have, the more you have." I agree. I think the key is ALLOWING your imagination out. We are taught to avoid whimsy, to be serious when we are children. It's like cutting off your creative hands. Like the habit of shame, locking down our creative impulses and childlike whimsy is a difficult thing to overcome.
As an analogy, I had to do a kidney scan to see if problem I was having was due to a congenital defect in one of the kidney's valves. These doctors and techs expected me to pee while I was laying under the scanner. Do you think I could do that? Of course not! And I really, really tried!
(As it turns out, they admitted to me later that they'd never had an adult who could pee themselves on purpose, either!)
That says something about the unconscious connections our thinking has with bodily functions.
But whimsy is where some of the greatest creativity occurs.
It's like a sentence cube game I have. I played it with Spouse and a sister-in-law. I would always win because I could come up with incredibly long sentences while they could not. The difference was that my sentences made no sense - but were still correct in grammar usage. They could never get past creating a sentence that meant something.
I kept telling them, "You have to think like Dr. Seuss."
Writing things out is the tedious part, isn't it?
That said, I distinguish between hard whimsy and soft whimsy.
The soft stuff goes into my blog, the hardcore into my WIP.
The tedium of actually doing it is hard. If only I could generate words on paper, or in a computer, even as fast as I talk, which is only a fraction of the speed I think. Then I could have all my stuff there and ready. Ready for what, I don't know. But it would be ready.
The Legion of On-Line Super Heroes blog was created for soft whimsy. Or hard. Depending on how much time and effort one had available.
Whimsy implies a joy that is present in childlike pursuits. Or perhaps I should say pursuits done with a childlike mind.
Post a Comment