Never Throw Your Story Ideas Away

If you're like me, then your brain is a sieve.  You constantly take notes on ideas and if you don't, no matter how well-meaning your "I won't forget this" mantra may be, it will soon be gone whenever you finally find the time to search for pen and paper.

Therefore, you have scads of notes scattered around your desk/office/home/car/bedroom/and beyond.  There may even be a few furiously typed notes somewhere on your harddrive. 

What I've learned from these brilliant flashes of inspiration is to NEVER throw ANY of them away.  Even if you think you'll never use it in a story or poem.  Who knows when they can come in handy?

Case in point, I used to be a member of a forum who had a writing prompt every week of 1000 words.  They'd give you a situation, and it was up to you to write a scene, not an entire story, just a scene, depicting this situation.  So you had the freedom of making up characters and different time frames if you wanted.  I have about 10 to 15 of these little snippets that are still taking up space on my computer.

So far, two of these gems have been expanded into stories of their own.  If I had merely thrown the ideas away, I would have two less books in my repitoire.  The others, while I might not expand them, could contain pertinent ideas, situations, or even characters that I want to "steal" for an entirely different story.

The ultimate example of "never throw anything away" comes from a fantasy "series" I wrote as a child.  I must have been about thirteen years old when I wrote them.  Very cheesy, very cliche, but I kept them for years.  There were three short stories, each handwritten and about 15 pages each, front and back.  My middle school classmates loved them.

After I was married, I came across these stories in the notebook I'd stashed away.  Re-reading them with fresh eyes, I knew these ideas I had as a child had merit, even if the writing was awful.  So I decided to take these ideas and re-work them from the ground up, fleshing out my fantasy world, and turning my cheesy little stories into a series to be proud of.  Now, these books are known as The Wolverine Chronicles, full of magical talismans and the dragons who created them, not to mention knights of the king and the women they fall in love with.

This series is currently being queried at both Samhain Publishing and Mundania Press, so we'll see who gets back to me first regarding that!  But the point is, if I had tossed those old cheesy stories from yesteryear, I wouldn't have these books to brag about.  And even now, I can remember a few stories I'd written as a child but cannot find. 

It saddens me to think that they are gone forever.

So what little flashes of inspiration you might get, don't ever toss them with your Spring Cleaning.  Keep every single scrap.  You never know when your muse may just whisper in your ear about that one short story you wrote ten years ago . . . .

~~Becka

http://www.RebeccaGoings.com