Just this morning I was having a “conversation” on Facebook with an old high school friend. She has always been an avid reader, and a million years ago when we were kids, she was a writer, too.

I was always jealous of her ability to get inside her own imagination, to make up a story about something that was going on inside her head. I was always a much more literal person (you will not be surprised to learn that I later graduated from law school). But when I realized that practicing law was not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life, when I started writing with just the tiniest seed of an idea, when I started encouraging my imagination to make up stories and when I started writing them down, I found out that I’m not as literal as I always supposed myself to be. I’ve got an imagination, and now I use it. All the time.

But whatever happened to my high school friend? She can’t stop reading long enough to finish writing the stories she starts, she told me.

That got me thinking about other writers I know (lots of them) who have never published anything because they’re too busy working on too many stories at once. These are people who make no secret of their desire to be published writers, but they just can’t seem to finish even one story before they start the next.

I want to shake these people by the lapels and shout, “FINISH SOMETHING ALREADY!”

I don’t do that, of course, but I’d like to.

It’s great to have a head full of stories just bursting to get out, but if a writer wants to be published, what good does it do if he is always looking to the next big idea without finishing his previous big idea?

Here’s my solution to that problem: keep a notebook and dedicate it to jotting down the ideas that fight to be heard while you’re working on something else.

This accomplishes three things: first, it allows you to acknowledge those other ideas by writing them down. Second, it prevents you from forgetting those ideas before you have the time to return to them. And third, it allows you to get back to your work once the ideas have been memorialized.

When you’ve finished your work-in-progress, take a look at the notebook and decide which of the ideas you’d like to tackle next.

I use a notebook system when I write. I practically lifted it directly from Phyllis Whitney’s Guide to Fiction Writing, which is never far from me. I keep a three-ring binder and divide it into sections: work calendar, theme and situation, story chronology (where I keep track of ages and dates to make sure everything gels), book chronology (where I keep track of each chapter’s length), possible titles, character names I like (and may use in future books), background, research, characters, plotting, outlining, bibliography, to-be-checked, and ideas for future stories.

It’s a small section, that last one, but very important.

Sometimes when I’m writing, but more often when I’m not writing, I’ll think of something that might make a good story. Rather than following the road which the idea invites me to take, I write down the bare bones of the idea in my notebook and don’t refer to it until my current project is done.

Because finishing the current project is what we all need to do, right? We can’t hope to see our names in print unless we actually finish something. And I don’t mean sort-of finish something, I mean finish. It’s polished, it’s been revised and edited to death, and it’s ready to go out the door.

Only then is it time to get to work on something new, and that’s when the idea notebook comes in handy. You’ve written enough to remind yourself of the idea, and finally you have the time to encourage it, to grow it, to start writing something new.

I hope you’ll try the notebook approach if you find yourself overwhelmed with too many ideas, and I invite you to share your ideas below for staying on track with your current project.

Amy

(You can find out more about Amy in her Guest Author article HERE – TSRA)