Notes In The Margin #10: You Can Never Have Too Many Ideas

It never ceases to amaze me how the human mind can create, visualise and manifest complete ideas and concepts from the imagination.

Especially when that imagination is my own.  It's been a fertile ground for stories and ideas for as long as I can remember.  I wrote my first stab at a novel before I was ten.  The product of childhood games, dreams and a prolonged stay in hospital.  It was nine pages long and got published in my junior school library.

When I was fourteen I corralled my ideas into my second attempt.  It was a thriller.  I got eight chapters in before I ran out of confidence and patience with my poor typing skills despite ideas aplenty.

I had another go at sixteen, this time at writing a sci-fi epic.  That one took three years and actually got finished, despite being a thousand page monolith.  It wasn't good enough to get published though. The writing's poor, the plot's confused and it's bloated with complexity, but many of the ideas I had for it are still brilliant and full of potential.  Maybe I'll rewrite it one day...

Then I got serious.  Tried my hand at a thriller again when I started working, The Wickedest War.  I wrote it on the commute to and from London each day.  I was inspired by the city, by the people, by events going on around me.  The ideas flowed and the first draft was finished in just over a year.  I submitted it to several agents ("You submitted a first draft?  What were you thinking?", you cry).

It got rejected.  But the ideas kept coming.

Sequels, fragments of ideas, revisions to old ideas and the novels, they just wouldn't stop.  I've still got notebooks brimming with observations, research, doodles and what-if scenarios from those days.

The Wickedest War got a long overdue second draft and benefited from an injection of fresh material.  That made it better, but it still wasn't right.  The third draft consumed more ideas, new scenes, new depths to the characters and the plot.  Then the fourth draft, then the fifth draft.  It changed constantly as I swung between the fresh material and those that formed the foundations of the plot.

Then the big one struck and 360 was born.  A story that demanded I create a new world without the limitations of the real world!  I went crazy with the first draft.  Too much freedom.  The imagination was let off the leash and like an errant dog, it wouldn't come to heel.

I retreated back to The Wickedest War.  Back to the real world, back to researching my ideas, testing their mettle, validating their credibility.  I took it apart and rebuilt it from the ground up.

But still the other ideas continued to flow, like turning that never completed sequel to The Wickedest War into a standalone story with new characters.  It's all there now.  It just needs writing.  But I had to finish 360. So I focused on that.

And Kiraran's Crucible.  That's simmered in a back corner of my my mind for a good three, or four years now and it's gone from one book, to three.  Ideas breeding others ideas.  Characters, settings, scenes and plot threads.

And still they keep springing from that mysterious area of my mind called my imagination.  A thousand jigsaw pieces from a hundred puzzles seeping from my head and I can't stop them.  All I know is that if I can piece them together I can make stories out of some of them.

Some of them are daft.  Some of them are really cool.  I don't think I suffer from Writer's Block.  It's more like Writer's Constipation.  I get anxious.  I worry that the ideas aren't good enough and I get all tense and the ideas stop.  Except the don't stop.  I'm just not letting them out.

Not every idea I have for a my writing will be good.  Not every idea will find its way into a story.  I have to accept that work with it.  The ideas will come.  I mustn't stop them.

The trick is keeping my eye out for the corkers and weaving them into wonderful tales!