Recently I had an amazing catchup with my writing buddy Renee Dahlia (http://www.reneedahlia.com/) who is well on her way to becoming a prolific romance author. Now I do romance as part of my overall plots, and I love to read them, but it’s not my jam to write. My jam is fantasy, as well you might have guessed. Her jam is romance.
While we caught up about the usual (family, friends, work), we also chatted about writing, which is one of my favourite things to do. I am fascinated with the way other writers work, and comparing that to the way I write and work. I think most writers are the same – always obsessing about is this the right way to write? Is what I’m doing going to yield the results I want? What do others do?
For example: ideas.
My ideas come from the slush pile in my mind. Everything I see and experience all go into the pile and eventually mushrooms start growing out of them and those mushrooms might be their own story or a character that has a story and so they grow from there. Sometimes I throw stuff into the mix just to see what might come out – a terrible movie I watched that I want to “improve” or a bad book that I think I could do better on.
Renee’s ideas seem to be situational. What would I do in this situation? What if I owned this place, or what if I met this person and this might happen? She’s currently writing a series on Formula 1 because her kids started watching it and she became fascinated with the world they live in. Ideas pour out of her and she admitted she just isn’t going to write them all.
I’m not going to write them all either. If I wrote every book I thought about I’d have 140 novels at the least. I WISH! that I had the time and energy to write them all. I do. But there’s this thing called life and family and the need to eat and stuff that gets in the way… so paid work takes precedence.
So what I do is put the ideas into what I call my “Ideas bible”. It’s a clearfile (two, actually) containing the people’s names, plot summary, snippets of writing and often a map (because fantasy). It’s my easy-access reference guide when I am writing, and if I get stuck and want to move to something else, I can quickly flip through the pages and see what speaks to me. It’s always growing and changing. I have known to grow a new idea, go through and see what suits, and morph one idea into another, or throw away an entire plot or page of people to include the new one into the old one.
It’s a way to keep all those ideas in one place, to keep the reference documents I’ve created neat and tidy, and a way for me to keep the books I want to write until one day I have written them.
To be honest I live in constant anxiety that my house will burn down and my ideas bible will be lost, but I’m working on it.