Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be “Ideas” but they are dear to me so…
Please indulge me in my silliness.
I have a page posted up next to my computer with a list of possible plots for future books. Sometimes it is quite a long list. Actually it is always long because obviously I get ideas at a faster pace than I am able to write them and most of them end up not working as books in any case.
There are ten or so right now.
I’ve written and been published in middle-grade but only one of them is a tween (forgive me!) book. It could perhaps be a series but that might be making too much of it.
The rest of them are decidedly YA.
I am excited about two or three in particular, so much that I have to be very firm about squashing them when they rise up and try and distract me from my current WIP. Anyone else out there worry about not having enough time to complete everything you would like to?
I am about 3/4 of the way through my first draft. There’s a lot of revision work ahead of me but not so much that I can’t indulge myself in a little fantasy about what’s next.
What I realized is that it’s not going to be the humorous, wacky idear. At least not yet. That one is plotted and clear and pretty well thought out. Or the middle-grade- ditto.
No, it’s going to be the difficult one. The one that is a mere glimmer of an idea, with a whole bunch of potential plotting problems and questions that I will have to answer ahead of time, and a whole heap of eccentric characters who act devastatingly human most of the time. That’s the one which nags and teases at me and won’t go lie down and be quiet.
How do you decide what’s next? Is it important to challenge yourself so that you don’t get bored? Will your writing be boring if you are bored? And does it need to have that uncertainty, that excitement, that sort of blind faith that you and the story will somehow muddle along and get to the end, breathless, exhausted and totally surprised that it came out of you?
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2 thoughts on “Idears”
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Jo,
Yes, I’m familiar with all those sensations. A while back I wrote a slightly tongue-in-cheek post on my blog about setting up a new web site called plotswap.com, where writers with too many ideas and not enough time to write them all could post story ideas for other writers, in need of ideas, to pick up …
For me there needs to be this thrill of anticipation at the thought of writing a short story or a novel. A pressure to get that one done.
I think you’re to be congratulated on going for the challenging idea. The novel I’m writing at the moment is like that : it’s a crazy off-kilter idea, with all sorts of plot-twists I only have glimmers about at the moment. But it just won’t go away.
I know, difficult is good. And working out exactly how to write it, is a challenge.
And having lots of ideas is good too. In fact I feel very lucky to be constantly inspired and inundated with ideas even if most of them never amount to anything.
Just imagine if the opposite were true?
Deadly!
PS- you are just the king of the link aren’t you? It took me about an hour to link things on the Scribbler blog, and many hours beforehand getting it completely wrong. I think I’ve had blog in the past where the entire text has been a link to something.
However I will forgive you since the award was kindly meant and because you wrote a book with the title “Hedge Witch” which just sets my imagination racing. Get published so I can read it!