Yes, I’ve blogged about this before. I have a bunch of ‘maybe’ projects simmering on the back burner, waiting to be picked up and worked on, or trunked and forgotten. It’s not going to take center stage until I finish and release The Balance of Light, so it’s going to be a while, but that doesn’t mean I can’t start with the pre-production. I can certainly start playing around with outlines, character sheets, timelines and whatnot. Just that the bulk of the project won’t begin until at least sometime this autumn.
But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the process of starting a new project. As I’ve said before, it’s been so long since I’ve come up with a completely new idea that sometimes I wonder if I’ve forgotten how to do it. [I don’t always think this, though…one of the ‘maybes’ came out of nowhere during my 750 Words exercises, so I know I can do it.]
I know I sometimes overthink this part of the process; it’s the most stereotypical of writer’s blocks: what should I write? We focus too much on wanting/needing to start something. It’s like when you need to start that term paper for English class, but you have no idea what to write about…and that’s when you start stressing, because you’re focusing too much on getting it done before deadline and not enough on the writing itself.
I try to keep my mind open when new ideas come to me; more to the point, I try not to rely mainly on chance and random inspiration, because that almost never works. The trick is to sow some kind of seed of an idea and work with it for a bit, see if you can make something out of it. I tend to be a pantser in terms of writing, so what I consider my best ideas usually come from something only distantly related to it: one of the ‘maybes’ I have on tap came to me out of someone else mentioning the Osmonds in passing on their blog. Out of that came the idea of writing a fictional music biography.
I have an idea jar here in Spare Oom, a long narrow glass jar with a plastic stopper that I bought for a dollar-something at the kitchenware store up the street. I haven’t used it in some time, but there’s a few years’ worth of scrap paper in there of passing ideas. Thoughts that came to mind that I didn’t have time to follow up on. Just images, scenes, or characters that popped into my head while I was doing something else. I haven’t even looked at these notes for some time, so now I’m curious as to what’s listed. I used a few of them for my daily practice words a year or so ago. Perhaps it’s time to do that again.
I’m not sure what I’m going to write after the Bridgetown Trilogy is done, but at least I’m going to be somewhat prepared.
Welcome to Bridgetown 