The Very Useful File and the Idea Crumbs
I have a file of ideas on my computer called “brainstorm.” It’s not the most clever name for a file, nor is it formatted in a way that would keep my obsessive-compulsive personality happy. However, it is a Very Useful File (if I may used a Pooh-like term). You probably have one, too.
What I have recently found interesting is how quickly we can take an idea and morph it into something else. And we can do this without whiplash. We are, after all, writers. That means we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, and no one can say differently.
Unless someone says differently. But that’s not the kind of writing profession to which I’m referring.
As Creatives, we have the power to add our thoughts to something like a Very Useful File, then modify them to a point in which they no longer resemble what we first wrote down. Maybe the theme is there or some Snippet of Good Stuff, but the story we end up writing is vastly different.
Here’s an example. In 2011 (or so…years run together), I wrote the following idea in my Very Useful File.
“People of an upper class of society buy into an underground cataclysm shelter and move in when told to do so. Communications are disrupted in the shelter, however, and the people inside debate whether or not anything happened. They live there for a year, run out of supplies and send a runner to get more. When the runner leaves the shelter, he/she finds that nothing has happened, but since he/she left in the dead of winter in a blizzard, he/she can’t find his/her way back. The people underground suffer more, learn to make do with what they have, figure out how to grow food in the underground garden, and live for another five or six years while reinventing their class tiers (those that were equally rich become separated into lower, middle, upper class, etc.). Finally, someone else decides to leave the shelter and discovers that nothing has happened and all the shelter members are safe… but have lost everything they had and are all equally in the lower class of society.”
– from my Very Useful File
That idea languished in my file for years. When I stumbled across it one day as I was adding a new idea (totally unrelated), I decided it might be time to do something with it. So, I dusted the thing off, took a hacksaw to it, and voila! A novel that only slightly resembles what I started with.
When an alert goes out to the paying members of the disaster bunker known as New Eden, recently wealthy yet highly dysfunctional Geoffrey and Portia Thompson grab their survival bag, let the staff of their palatial Plymouth Commonwealth estate go, and make the short journey to the rest of their lives. Joining them are one thousand additional souls, destined to repopulate the Earth and rebuild their once great world. Shortly after arriving and securing the hatch for good, communications to the outside world are cut off.
Everyone is convinced this is the end, to include Portia who has vowed to divorce Geoffrey and destroy everything he holds dear. With rations implemented and nerves shot, Geoffrey and his new friend Elisa Delarosa volunteer to travel to the surface to gather information and see if they can leave New Eden. When they and four others exit the shelter, however, they find a vastly different world. Gone is their reality, and in its place their worst nightmare. With no choice but to escape, they make a run back to New Eden where yet another nightmare awaits
– the “dustcover” jacket for Beneath Gehenna
Do you see the similarity? It’s there: a disaster bunker and the rich people who can afford it. What’s not there is all the rest.
Does that mean I will rid myself of the original idea still stuck in my Very Useful File?
Of course not, and I don’t think you would either. That’s how it is with ideas we jot down. You don’t have to include all the elements. You can use one or two and then perhaps, make a “leftover” novel later with something else.
They are Idea Crumbs. You can still eat them, right?
What do you do with your ideas? Do you jot them down in a notebook? Do you put them on an app on your phone? Do you have 3×5 cards stuck to your wall that you might look at every once in a while for inspiration?
Creatives are awesome people, and they have awesome ideas. Not all of those ideas make it in to print. It might be neat to look at some of the Very Useful Files of dead-yet-prolific-when-alive writers like Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway.
What Idea Crumbs did they leave behind?
