Yesterday, in the span of a half-hour, I came up with not one but two new story ideas. Different genres, different tones, even different POVs, the only thing they have in common is me.
I drove to the Cybercafe, whipped out a notepad (silly me, I’d left the laptop at home since I was supposed to be running errands) and wrote them up.
This is the part of being a writer that most folks don’t understand, as they sidle up next to me at parties and offer to let me have the privilege of writing up their great idea. Having ideas is never the problem, the hard part is picking just one to work on.
When you go to the shelter, you can’t take home every puppy you see– you’ve got to pick one. And the same goes for story ideas. Even if I live to be five hundred years old, I’ll never have time to turn all of my ideas into stories. So I have to choose carefully–adding up all the disparate factors from my passion for the story to market conditions and timing– a cool idea for a short story can be tucked in between contracts, a three book series can not. I’ll ask friends and colleagues for their advice, and then, when brain and heart agree, it’s time to start writing.
And to hope that this puppy will be easier to housebreak than the last.
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