Tracking Ideas and Inspirations for the Chaos Writer

I’m playing catch up this week — I was at Capclave, a sci fi con in Maryland this weekend.  Now I get all the stuff I didn’t do over the weekend.  I swear, I think Saturday and Sunday is when I run all my errands.  I’ll write a post about Capclave later on.  Meanwhile, back at the Capitol …

One of my writing goals for the quarter is structure.  Not structure like story structure, but outside structure, like organizing papers.  I grew up in a very disorganized house where things were stacked and we only cleaned up when we lost something.  The army was the opposite of that, but their organization never made much sense to me, so when I got out, it was like I exploded back in the other direction again.

But my writing is chaos, but when I let it spread to outside mundane things, it creates disorganization and more chaos that ultimately makes more work for me — and makes it harder to write.  So my goal is focused on finding things that work for me.

The first of these structure things is what to do with ideas.  When I started writing, I kept everything in a pocket notebook that I could carry around me.  Sometimes they ended up on scraps of paper.  Soon they began to breed …

Then they got lost.

Eventually, I turned the notebooks up and was amazed at how many notebooks I had with only a handful of ideas that I had never used stored inside.  Some were more than 20 years old!  So I evolved out of not recording anything because I figured I’d remember it if it was a good idea.

But it’s left me scrambling sometimes when it comes to short story ideas.

So right now, I’m experimenting with using a three-ring binder.  One idea per page, and date it to give it an expiration.  If I’m inspired by a newspaper article, I write the inspiration, not save the whole article.  We’ll see how this works out.

How do you store/track your ideas?

–

Linda Adams, Soldier Storyteller

WRITING STUFF

Starting November 5, I will doing a month-long session on Forward Motion on “Basic Training of Military Culture.”  The lesson plan for the course is posted here.

Check out my article Balancing Writing and Blogging on Vision: A Resource for Writers.  It deals with the pesky issue of time management so that blogging doesn’t interfere with writing.

And for a little Halloween fun, a very short story about the House of Green Cats on IO9.

VISIT

Natalie Markey talks about her first day in Saudi Arabia as a non-Saudi Arabian.  I remember when I saw my first Saudi Arabian women.  They reacted as if I were a strange alien creature.

 

Goals — What’s Them Things?

We did our quarterly writing goals at the Cat Vacuuming Society (a Northern VA critique group) this last week — always a hard task.  I’m always wondering what other people will think because my goals and reasoning sometimes doesn’t follow with the crowd.  For “homework,” we had to come up with three writing goals/habits, though I also added promotion habits:

Writing Goals/Habits:

1. Add more structure.  This results from researching my “Basic Training on Military Culture” class for Forward Motion.  The military is very structured because war is chaos.  My writing tends to be chaos, so I need to find ways to impose structure (and just to clarify, I’m not referring to structure within the story).
2. Listen to myself.  Another habit that I really need to pay attention to more than I have been.  Right now I’m embracing humor back into my book.  It’s one of the things I wanted to do with the omniscient viewpoint.  But after I got comments back from the agent that the voice was too strong, I took out all the humor.  When I attended a workshop with Allen Wold at Marscon, it crept in again, and the panelists there said, “No, don’t put the humor in the narrative.”  So I’ve been steering away from what I wanted to do because everyone else says to.  Then I read this article from Rebecca LuElla Miller and it reminded me that I needed to listen to myself.
3. Make an effort not to underdo things when I write.  If you tell me to dribble in backstory and not do backstory dumps, I will end up with none at all in the story.

Promotion Goal/Habits:

1. Do one blog post per week that’s more opinionated.  I’ve tended to back down on things where I do have an opinion and it doesn’t go along with the rest of the crowd.  It’s really kind of scary to be the only one saying, “Wait a minute, this is not right” and sticking to it, even people disagree.  So I’m making an effort to not back off.  My post on Unleaded, Writers Block is Not a Figment of Your Imagination is an example of my branching off into that area.
2. Make sure I put something out about me in my blog, like promoting my upcoming class or the article that’s coming out in Vision in October.  Half the time I forget, so I have to make extra effort.
3. Leave flyers and/or Moo cards at science fiction cons that I attend.

This is a flyer I made up for the con I’m going to in October:

Quarterly goals sound really nice because it is such a short term.  If I try to set them for a year or five years, I end up falling off the goal wagon very fast.  What are your goals for the next quarter? Share them below.

And meanwhile, some real cat vacuuming for your viewing pleasure:

 

Can You be too Goal-Focused?

Though I’ve read a lot of time management books, I’ve never thought of setting goals.   If you’d asked me a few years ago if I had goals, I would have said I was a goal-less person.  Turns out I’m very goal-focused.  Maybe too much.

Can you be too goal-focused? Read the rest on Unleaded Fuel for Writers.