I recently watched a video of Stephen King talking to a group of university students. It was a question and answer type of thing, and at one point, the subject of keeping a notebook of ideas came up.<\/p>\n
If I\u2019m remembering this correctly (and in the spirit of full disclosure, it\u2019s completely possible I\u2019m not), King said he didn\u2019t have one. He took a survival-of-the-fittest approach when it came to his ideas. If something occurred to him that sounded like a decent story idea, he\u2019d let it rattle around in his head for a while, along with whatever else was in there at the time.<\/p>\n
If the idea was persistent enough and kept presenting itself, he\u2019d eventually get around to writing it. It was his way of letting the cream rise to the top.<\/p>\n
At this point, I\u2019m going to state the obvious: I am not Stephen King . . . yet. (But I\u2019m comin\u2019 for you, old man. You best be keepin\u2019 a lookout.)<\/p>\n
While I admire King\u2019s mind and its ability to keep churning out ideas, I am constantly worried about my story well running dry, so I don\u2019t take any idea for granted. I write them all down, half-formed or not. I hate the idea of a missed opportunity.<\/p>\n
Scattered around my house are three different journals where I jot down ideas. These include plots I want to think about, story set-ups that seem to have promise, characters that I want to explore, or even bits of dialogue that just pop into my head. Those that fall into that last category are usually a joke or something I find amusing that I want to work into a future story somehow.<\/p>\n
Once things go into the journal, I don\u2019t stop thinking about them. It\u2019s just that putting them down on paper somehow makes them more solid, and it eases my worry that I might forget about them.<\/p>\n
One of my journals has the plot of what I think is my next novel. I\u2019ve already written some initial character sketches and included visual cues to remind me what each person looks like. I\u2019m more or less ready to starting banging out that story; I just can\u2019t settle on the first line. Several drafts of that can also be found in those pages. (Beginnings are a big deal to me, and I\u2019m fairly obsessed about nailing the first line before I start.)<\/p>\n
The pages of another of my journals are haunted by a kid named Notebook. I don\u2019t know a lot about him other than my suspicions that he might be a tragic figure. I don\u2019t necessarily want this to be the case because I kind of like him based on what little I\u2019ve written, but again the entry point into his story is eluding me. I won\u2019t know what happens to him until I can get in and flesh out the plot. For now, he is safe in his leather-bound haven.<\/p>\n
In case you\u2019re beginning to suspect my journals are a place where ideas go to die, never fear. Occasionally, one or two make a break for it and manage to see the light of day. One of those was the short story \u201cScout Pack\u201d that I wrote for the Caf\u00e9 back in September. For those interested, you can find it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The bones of that story sat in my journal for years. I had a general premise, knew the twist, and was familiar with all the principal players. I still think there\u2019s a longer piece of fiction to be made with this same group of guys, but at least I have a starting point now.<\/p>\n I\u2019m well aware that I may seem obsessed with my journals, but I\u2019m comfortable with that. They\u2019re my own version of an external hard drive, and in case of a house fire, there\u2019s a pretty good chance I\u2019m grabbing those journals before the family photo albums. After all, those pictures are shared memories. But these leather-bound beauties . . . they\u2019re all mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently watched a video of Stephen King talking to a group of university students. It was a question and answer type of thing, and at one point, the subject of keeping a notebook of ideas came up. If I\u2019m remembering this correctly (and in the spirit of full disclosure, it\u2019s completely possible I\u2019m not), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[170,534,584,676,1069],"class_list":["post-7993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writers-life","tag-character-sketches","tag-ideas","tag-journals","tag-memory","tag-story-ideas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}