too many ideas to count

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

- Orson Scott Card

A writer’s life revolves around post-it notes, jotted down afterthoughts, and sentences scrawled on fast food napkins. One of those pocket notebooks helps, so does a laptop, a palm pilot, a multi-tasking phone, a daily/weekly/monthly mega planner, a thick To Do list notepad, and an extensive filing system, but ultimately it all comes down to wherever you managed to scribble down the idea that ran through your head while you were standing on the platform waiting for the train yesterday morning.

Point is, those little scraps here and there, those fleeting moments of inspiration, they all add up to . . . well, something. Even if we don’t know what exactly it is at the moment that we’re looking for, all those chance encounters, strange occurrences, bad days, and frightened moments all end up creeping out in one story or another. It’s just a matter of finding all those sticky notes and ripped napkins.

Then, of course, there’s the rest of it. They say everyone has a good beginning, even maybe a good ending, but it’s somewhere in the middle that it all falls apart. So what is a writer to do when all there seems to be is one great idea after the other? Well, the obvious step would be to just start writing, but the reality is that there are probably millions of great stories left floating on an ellipsis somewhere, abandoned in the bottom of a drawer.

Writers are afraid of writing crap, and as a result, they’re often left not writing at all. That gap between what you imagined in your head and what came out on paper can be devastating. To the creatively inept, those who equate art and words to nothing more than hobbies (even though without it, all the science and math and physics in this world would exponentially leave the world that much more depressing), such a concept is lost, but to the writer, closing that gap is often what you live for and often the reason why you keep writing.

It begins with the idea, and that’s important. How many people fall out of cabs and miss their trains and lose their luggage and get insulted by a stranger without seeing the potential behind it? How often do we shut our eyes, cover our ears, only to miss the craziness?

Out of one hundred ideas, maybe only one of them will work, and even then, the story might fall flat. Hours of crap writing, pages of ill-focused nonsense, lifeless characters, uninteresting descriptions. All the worst comes out first, but dig your way through it, and then when you least expect it, when you’ve convinced yourself that you were meant to work in a cubicle somewhere, you’ll find an idea that works, and a story that made all the hardship worthwhile.