Writing World Wednesday - Running The Fuel

Filling your creative tank should be a habit to use regularly. Without any ideas, you can’t write. When Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519, he left behind dozens of notebooks full of art projects, paintings, and inventions. Some of them informed future inventions decades later like the helicopter. Da Vinci’s journals are a reminder of the importance of generating ideas every day. His words showed us how we can better understand the world around us and make a habit of sharing them with other people. Since all of us are busy with responsibilities that tend to drive towards hard conclusions and wear out energy, we never take the time to jot down what we really think; the one voice poking at our brains and telling us, “what if this works?”

Record everything you wish to work on. Don’t dismiss or censor whatever comes to mind. Make progress as quickly as you can and move on to the next one. The exercise of generating ideas will force your brain to make new connections and mash old ones. If you are struggling, try writing down at least five different things:

* five reasons why something will/will not working-class

* five reasons why you’re for/against something

* five ideas to combine

* five things you need to do next

* five headlines/academic journals you can source

* five ways to open and close a story

* five questions you need to answered

* five unusual facts of information you possess

* five strengths and weaknesses of your chosen topic

Much like freewriting, it doesn’t matter where your ideas come from, It’s about aiming for quantity and, if you’re comfortable enough, add quality. If you capture 30 bad ideas there’s a good chance one might stand out from the others. Conversely, it might sound impossible once you get started. If it sticks with you long enough, you can raise the bar high and surprise yourself with what you can achieve. The more ideas you have, the more time and easier it will be to sit down in front of the blank page.

Every day, I write down at least three ideas for stories, notes for those stories, and blog posts. Some of them are god awful, but it’s better than having none at all and sitting around all day with no task to do. Most carpet cleaners are independent contractors and receive a job with a description and a reserved time to arrive. That’s what your job as a writer should offer. I don’t want to run out of fuel, I want to keep exploring.

Now, once you got into the habit of making up ideas, you’ll find there are too many to act on. There just enough time in the day and life to carry too many commitments to write about everything. Here’s the thing: An idea carries a cost. You could be spending time writing about something else, like, say, a 90000-word manuscript sitting on your computer while you got a description for an article or short story that’s only a page long. It’s fresh, new and delivered to you from a mysterious man in a black suit with no ID.

The question to ask yourself is, how do I decide which is more important? Why do you want to act on an idea and if it’s something you’re passionate about. This pursuit is harder and more time-consuming, but more satisfying. Becoming a productive writer means putting more wood on the fire or fuel for the truck, and spending time on your ideas to an essential value. Achieve or discard what you don’t need and use the best ones for the blank page.