Lost Ideas

Hello, all!

Well, yesterday's post was pretty much a fail. I'm working on additions to it right now, though, so video/pictures will be added in relatively soon.

Earlier, I was poking through my inspiration folder on my computer and through the inspiration notebooks that I have (yes. PLURAL.), and I realized that I have wayyyy too many half-baked ideas and random scraps of possibly-somethings that I really don't know what to do with them. I think they'll have a role at some point in SOMETHING I write, but what if they don't? I already have two unfinished novels that have at least 50,000 words to them, and quite a few others that never even made it to 2o pages. What of those? Are all those ideas lost because I never actually do anything with them?

Do you remember that awesome idea I had for a story a long while ago? The one where I started a blog for it and then wrote a few entries that were part of this bigger story and then promptly deleted because I felt idiotic? You probably don't. I kept it a secret.

Sometimes, I have these ideas for a story, or these thoughts that pop into my head but I really can't make sense of them. I don't know where they came from, or who said them, these random snatches of narrative and dialogue that I scribble down in the margins of papers and then later type or add to the notebook. I never know what will come of them, if anything at all. I just save them now, because far too many times I've had a story idea come to me and then I'd promise myself that I most definitely would remember it. But over the course of a day, those get lost. They wander from my brain, tumbling from my mind like Humpty Dumpty from his wall (... that was a strange analogy. I'm not very poetic today.).

They're all scraps. These words are scraps, these phrases of no more meaning than the paper cutouts children save, the ripped pieces of scribblings from coloring books or magazines or books. They're the unfiltered ramblings of my imagination. Sometimes I wonder if I'm right to save them, but most of the time, I delight in their unassuming nonsense. They mean nothing until I give them a place amongst other words. They are only words until I make them into a story, only inspirations until they form a true idea.

I really love collecting all the random babblings of my mind, to be honest. I love looking over things that I thought of but don't remember (see how that works?), the brain crack (phrase stolen from Hank Green) that I never follow through on. In the same way, I love collecting ideas and grand schemes for things that I can't do, or haven't yet done for some ridiculous reason. What is holding me back from them? Why can't I just DO whatever it is that I come up with? I mean, I'm good at excuses. That question was rhetorical.

Once again, I really don't know where I was going with this. Ideas. Inspirations. I collect them and seek them out, on the internet and real life, but sometimes they just... exist.

So... tell me, what ideas do you have? What ideas have you forgotten about? What are you going to do about them?

(Because I have an idea for what to do with some of these snatches of ideas. You'll see. Maybe. Hopefully. :) )

A demain!
-Aly