I encountered more than my fair share of medical anomalies while in my twenties and was left with many hours waiting in doctor’s offices, waiting in lines, waiting in hospital beds, etc. You get the picture. I was left in situations primed for that day dreaming side of me and though my imagination relished the freedom to explore its boundaries, it left me with a lot of stories to write. My day dreaming was indiscriminate; I didn’t just day dream in specific genres, the landscape of that blessed dream world is peppered with children’s stories, memoirs, short stories, romance, paranormal, and, my favorite, science fiction.
I had this deep dark fear of writer’s block back then and I felt that any idea was a good one. The ideas I dreamed up existed on scraps of paper, as notes in my cell phone, emails to myself, and scribbled in the margins of my favorite paperbacks. I was not foolish; I saved all the story ideas for further contemplation and exploration.
When it came down to actual writing, my focus was blurry; the same way an out of focus camera takes horrible pictures so did my fingers tap out dreadful stories. They were disjointed, inconsistent, and unable to bring into clear view that story that looked entirely pristine in my mind. I had to remove the cob webs and vacuum out the dust created by all that story idea traffic running through my head. The only way to do that was to put each to rest and I thought on it for a while before deciding what I could do to, at once, preserve them and eliminate their imprint in my thoughts.
I have one of those "A" type personalities - you know, the “analytical” type - so I approached the issue with some semblance of organization and logic. At first, the results were nothing more than a list of ideas with a title and short descriptive sentence or two. Over time it developed into a list that included dates and genre. Finally, my list morphed into a complete index that I can organize and update.
If any of the items listed in the index required that I add more than a paragraph length description, then I also created a subject file to start holding only information (i.e., photos, character development, maps, research articles, etc.) pertaining to that specific idea. The index and idea files are all set up electronically. They make it to hard copy when they are in full development – meaning I am currently working on a manuscript. Here is a screen print of my index:
You can see the different tabs at the bottom which breaks the index up by Novels, Short Stories, Children, Memoirs, and Poems. You can break yours up or keep it all together.
