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Welcome
to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's
time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop.
If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog
hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy,
ideas, and networking. If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek
behind the curtain of a writing life.
Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. The awesome co-hosts for the June 3 posting of the IWSG are Victoria Marie Lees, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, and C. Lee McKenzie!
June 3 question - Do most of your story ideas come from one place (the news, dreams, etc.) or do they hit from all over the place?
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Story ideas seem to stalk me. They're EVERYWHERE. Some of them just open up like trap doors and I fall in. Others snatch at my ankles and trip me up when I'm trying to go to the grocery store. A few are responses to things I've seen or read or heard. The weirder ones just sort of drift in like a cloud and rain on me for a moment. Every idea I have calls up her cousins and invites them to the party, too. Sooooo many ideas.
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The difficulty for me has never been coming up with ideas, but more in the choosing one and staying focused on it long enough to see it to fruition. I think that's part of why it took me so long to "get serious" about my writing life and start finishing things and ushering them down the whole road into publication.
These days, I'm getting better at assessing quickly which ideas are "good" in the sense of having enough meat on their bones to make a whole story out of and which ones are more like a shower thought that might make a semi-clever social media post. The ones that are going to make it into short stories or books are persistent. They poke me more than once. That's part of how I know.
How about you?
I agree with you that ideas are everywhere, though they don't stalk me like you. It's good that you're better at figuring out which are the good ones to pursue.
ReplyDeleteIt's taken some practice for sure!
DeleteI'm jealous of all the ideas stalking you! I haven't had a new idea in ages. Maybe that's because all of my old ideas are unfinished and won't let them in...
ReplyDeleteAh yes, the graveyard of unfinished ideas. I hope you can move them to a front burner soon.
DeleteWhat Sarah said! I've been dry of ideas since my last book.
ReplyDeleteIt can be hard, especially when life is being difficult.
DeleteLike Sarah, I, too, have a backlog of unfinished WIPs waiting to be finished, but when I am fortunate enough to be blessed with story ideas, the inspiration can come from anywhere. :)
ReplyDeleteI don't know how many backburners my creative stoptop has, but I'm sure it's a fire hazard.
DeleteTrap doors, indeed! I write everything down and then just leave them in my writing closet until it's their turn to be written :-)
ReplyDeleteYes! I do the same, just letting myself do enough to pin the idea down so it doesn't escape, but not letting myself fall into until it's time.
DeleteLucky you to be haunted with story ideas. Must be hard to sift through them all. :-)
ReplyDeleteSometimes! But I'll take it over struggling to find inspiration.
DeleteI love the term "stalk," that ideas stalk you. And bravo in assessing which ideas have enough meat in them to become finished stories. Go for it!
ReplyDeleteThank you! It took some time to learn to figure that out.
DeleteAt the risk of being annoying, you do know you can put a perma-link in your sidebar to your author site, right?
ReplyDeleteYeah, ideas are easy. It's the execution that's hard.
I do have it there as a featured post, but I'll look and see what else Blogger offers (which isn't much these days). I'd probably still put it at the top of these posts, too, though.
DeleteI wish ideas stalked me, Samantha! Wishing you lots of stalkers!
ReplyDeleteThese kinds of stalkers I'll take!
DeleteYeah, it's important to know if the idea can be a whole story.
ReplyDeleteJamie of UniquelyMaladjustedButFun
For sure. Some ideas just don't have enough to them to make anything of.
DeleteI have a whole lot of ideas. The question is are they ones I want to write about or not? If they don't inspire me with a desire to follow the idea through with 2 years of hard work to write the book, then I let go of it.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely! Not every idea is strong enough for that kind of commitment.
Delete