Hi friends, it’s been a while since I posted a blog! This one’s more than just a project update—it’s some organized thoughts about a topic that has been on my mind a lot lately: what do you do when you have more writing ideas than you have time to spend on them? I’ll share some tips and tricks that I’ve found helpful in the 20+ years I’ve been a writer and some examples from my own struggles and experience!
So, grab a cup of tea, coffee, bubbly water, or other fun drink of your choice, and join me to chat a little about what to do when you feel like you’ve been hit by a Texas-sized meteor of writing ideas, and there’s no Bruce Willis around to save you.
WHERE DO IDEAS COME FROM?
The question, “Where do you get your ideas?” is often derided in writer circles, and most books about writing I’ve read by popular authors do not have a good answer for it, at least not one that would satisfy the sort of person or interviewer who asks it.
The truth about ideas for writing and where they come from is different for everyone, but for me, they tend to come from asking “What if?” questions about something interesting I’ve seen in real life. That may seem weird for someone who writes exclusively fantasy books, but the fantasy part is where the “What if?” comes in. What if books, but magic? What regular college kid, but also a parallel world of faeries? What if you could make a pact with a god to breathe fire? Basically, What if things were different somehow?
From there it’s a matter of extrapolation. If this, then that. And as you may well have experienced, the branching path of possible story beats and directions can seem rather endless. A fractal tree of choose-your-own-adventure cause and effect that eventually leads to a completed novel.
There’s also this explanation from the late and much beloved Sir Terry Pratchett in his book, Wyrd Sisters. I read this book when I was a teen back in the 2000s, and felt immediately seen by this bit:
Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.
Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all
At the time, I was like, “Oh, me, me, me, that’s me!!!!” and while that feeling has gone up and down over the years, it feels extremely relatable in this moment right now, halfway through the year of our lord 2023, I can’t believe it’s 2023, but whatever, time isn’t real the way we think it’s real, it’s fine.
HELP I HAVE TOO MANY IDEAS
But time is unfortunately real enough for us as mortal, linear beings that we consider it a finite resource. What I’m saying is, that I currently have far more ideas for novels, novellas, books, stories, comics, games, decks, whatever, than I can currently work on simultaneously, given the number of hours and amount of energy I have in the day.
I could just save some for later, right? Go through them one or two at a time until they’re all completed, yes? I wish. The thing is, that I will keep getting new ideas. The pile never shrinks, it only grows. Much like the unread section of my bookshelf and kindle, I accumulate stories far faster than I am able to finish them.
I finished writing my first novel at fifteen, and since then I’ve written ten novels which I consider “finished,” though very few have gone on to end up published, along with a small handful of unpublished novellas and probably a dozen short stories. I have…probably two to three times more drafts which I consider “unfinished.” This does not count all the ideas that I have, say, drawn character sketches for or that I have a mental premise of but have not started writing outlines or chapters for—or never did, in the case of past ideas, but you get the picture.
Above, an example of my current folder of “Unfinished Book Ideas,” lol.
It’s always been like this. I have journal entries from my teen years complaining about this exact problem, and I had more energy and leisure time then than I do now as a decrepit 32 year old. (I jest. Thirty-two is not actually decrepit, it’s quite young in the long term scheme, haha.)
HOWEVER! I can say that over the years, I have developed some strategies for dealing with this admittedly first world problem a little better. I shall now share them with you in the hopes that it may help you with turning your own ideas into reality! And with coming to terms with the fact that no, we will never have enough time for it all… and that’s okay.
As always, this is just what works for me. What works for you may be the complete opposite approach, and that’s what’s so awesome about creativity! There’s no one way to approach it. But in case it does help:
TIPS AND TRICKS FOR YOUR OVERGROWN IDEA GARDEN
Don’t limit yourself (initially).
It may seem counterintuitive, but the way to deal with having too many ideas is not to build a dam to stop the river from flowing. It’s probably not going to stop. It’s just going to overflow or explode one day and take out whatever neat and tidy routine you’ve built up beneath it. If you’re me, you end up feeling super overwhelmed and unable to do ANY writing at all under the force of it.
I mean, sometimes the flow does stop. Sometimes you feel like you don’t have ANY good ideas and the source of the river has all dried up, but that’s a different video than this one.
Something I catch myself doing is judging my ideas way too early on in the process. Baby ideas can come in many different shapes and sizes, and when you have a lot of them, it can be tempting to put them in an arena together to see “which one is better,” aka, “which one I should actually spend my time on.”
But baby ideas are rarely if ever fully formed. You usually can’t immediately tell which one, with time and loving care, is going to turn out “the best” or “the most interesting.” Telling myself “well, that idea isn’t good enough, so I won’t even consider it, because my time and energy is limited” is probably more to my detriment than my benefit at this particular stage.
Let the ideas come as they are, in whatever quantity they come. Make lists. Keep them around, even if it’s just a few words of a premise or a title or the name of the main character. You don’t have to decide right away which ones you want to work on and which ones to set aside. You might get to use them later, perhaps even during one of those dry spells. Let the river flow naturally.
You see these? I was so so excited when I first came up with them. I have done. NOTHING. With them. Mostly nothing, anyway. But it was still fun to come up with them, and sometimes… they lead into ideas that are actually going somewhere by reusing bits and pieces. More on that later in the list.
2. Prioritize based on interest level, then stay disciplined.
Okay, so, you have your ideas, but you only have so much time, and you DO want to work on something. You DO want to finish something. How do you decide which idea to work on?
For me, that decision is based on a levels of interest and excitement. The idea that I’m most excited about is usually the idea I am most likely to spend my time writing, and more likely to follow through to the end. Excitement and interest levels can wane, but we’ll get into what to do about that in the next one.
What I will do once in a while when I’m feeling pulled in a lot of different writing directions is to make a list and rank my current choices from most interested/excited about to least. I can tell I’m interested in an idea when I feel naturally drawn to thinking about it and excited and impatient to write it. Once I hone in on which idea is currently making me feel that way the most, I know it’s going to be my priority.
Some people can work on multiple projects at a time. I usually have multiple writing projects in progress, but there is always one which is my top priority that I spend the most time and energy on, often leaving the other WIPs untouched for months at a time.
This is because at this point, during the actual writing process, I try to stay somewhat disciplined with my choice of project. Sometimes I will run off and work on other things, but for the most part, when presented with a choice, I will stick with the Top Priority project until it reaches the end of a particular stage—a full first draft, for instance, after which I will take a break.
For example, I finished the final draft of the second book in the Eternal Library series, The Tale That Twines, this spring and then had a kickstarter for it. I didn’t really work on any other ideas while I was working on that. But now, this summer, I’m working on The Perennial Empire, a humorous fantasy novella series. I’ll draft a few of those, and then after the Kickstarter is fulfilled at the end of the season, I plan to do the first draft of book three in the Eternal Library and not come back to the Empire novellas until after that is done.
3. Allow yourself to play around sometimes.
Despite having priorities and despite staying overall disciplined in my choices there, I do let myself have some room to play around. As an autistic person, I often struggle with demand avoidance. If something starts feeling like too much of a demand or obligation, even if it’s something I WANT to do, I will be unable to do it. I will become resentful and angry and stressed all to hell.
So I have to let myself go run and play sometimes. Take a little bit of a break to fiddle around with some other project that’s just below the top one on my list, even if that just means brainstorming scenes while I go for a walk or drawing the characters, but sometimes I might even write a little bit of another idea.
Even if you don’t have demand avoidance issues, this can potentially help let off steam and stress when it comes to staying dedicated to your top priority writing project. Other people may find they are TOO distractable and running off to play on other playgrounds might derail them enough that they end up getting nothing done for any project. It’s a balance that’s unique to all of us.
For example, right now my priority project is a novella series called The Perennial Empire. I just finished the first novella, Party of Fools, and really should be onto the second… but I had just finished a draft and I felt intimidated by starting another one so soon. I got a new idea about a cozy curse shop and a gnome and a very fabulous witch and a ghost grandpa and—I let myself write a few thousand words. I also made a book cover, even though I don’t even know if or when I’ll have time to finish writing it.
Taking a bit of a break to fiddle with THAT idea gave me time to readjust and be ready to come back to start the second Empire novella, which is called The Well Seasoned Hero, because it’s about food. Well, it’s about classism and the bullshit hero’s journey and tyrants and magic but—it’s also about food. You’ll see it out next year, hopefully.
An unedited excerpt from Party of Fools:
This was also when the Stranger entered the building. As a seedy bar, Ale’s Well was used to strangers. They had what you might call a diverse clientèle, the sort who didn’t ask questions and never gave up easy answers when it came to who or what they were and which line of work they were in, exactly. It was fluid that way, a liminal space in which a person might become anyone or anything at all, no matter who they were on paper.
Unfortunately, liminality fit this Stranger like a lumpy corset two sizes too small. You could see the way their strongly defined character squeezed out in all the wrong places, from the set of their broad shoulders to the way their cloak swirled lyrically around their feet, which were clad in boots that were visibly too expensive for this district despite the fact that they’d had quite a bit of mud scraped from them before entering.
Reed and Gladys appeared not to notice the Stranger. There’s a trope in stories like these where the hero walks into the seedy tavern and everyone stops to look at them, silence falling like an anvil. That may happen sometimes, somewhere, but not today and not here. Reed repeated the throaty chorus of Gladys’s ballad, eyes squeezed shut, face tipped toward the sky, and Gladys’s eyes remained fixed on him, her foot tapping ever so slightly.
4. Combine or cannibalize unfinished works/ideas into others.
This is probably my TOP writing tip for when you have too many ideas: combine them. Cannibalize chunks of one unfinished idea or story into another that’s further along or that you have more energy and interest in. This way you get the good big dopamine rush of playing with ALL the ideas, but you’re still working on just one actual project that you’re more likely to finish!
I also find that this can take a single idea or story to the next level. If your various ideas are particularly different from one another, it can add originality and tension and depth, which for me also usually increases my interest and dedication to working on that project.
For example, a couple years ago, I read a scifi story with an alien/human romance that I really didn’t like. I thought, I could do better! And came up with an idea about bee aliens for such a story of my own out of complete spite, even though I’ve never been particularly drawn to writing scifi or aliens. Unsurprisingly, that put it fairly low on my priority list.
Then while I was writing The Tale That Twines, the second book in my Eternal Library series, I found I needed a scifi book and TV series for the main characters to be obsessed with. So guess what? I took my bee alien idea—the beeliens if you will—and I turned that into the story-within-the-story that I needed.
I’ll probably never write the beelien idea on its own, but it still exists and I still got to play around with it. It also brought a whole new dimension to The Tale That Twines, which wasn’t originally focused on old scifi fandom, an aspect which now heavily informs the plot and brought an unexpected richness to the worldbuilding.
5. Don’t be precious; there will always be more.
Sometimes it can be hard to prioritize our writing ideas and figure out what we want to work on first and what we want to work on later or even let go of because ALL of it sounds good! We may not want to risk losing interest in an idea that we don’t immediately have time for because it just seems SO GOOD with SO MUCH POTENTIAL. It may seem like if you DON’T work on this particular idea RIGHT NOW, that something will be wasted, or you’ll miss your chance, because THIS is the BEST IDEA you’ve ever had and nothing else will ever be like it again!
The truth is, though, that we will always have more ideas. We may have dry spells, especially if we have other super stressful things going on in life. It may take a while to build an idea or world or story up to the point where it feels alive and beautiful and satisfying, but there will always be more ideas eventually, and there’s always potential for them to be THE NEXT BEST THING.
One of my painting professors at college used to tell us not to be “too precious” with our art to the point that we like an idea or an element of a painting we did so much that we’re afraid to take more risks or make changes because it might “get ruined.” Risks and changes are necessary in any creative medium, and that definitely includes writing. It’s okay to let some ideas wait around or to let them go entirely. There will always eventually be more.
In my own writing life, I faced this when I switched from writing in one particular universe to another. As a teen and in my early 20s, I wrote five books, assorted short fiction, and wrote/drew a 350 page webcomic all in the same universe, series title “Life in Glory.” I even have a tattoo for it on my ding dang arm. It was my first one. It’s not good. But I don’t regret it.
Some art from 2010 of the main characters from Radiant, the first book in the Life in Glory series, which was about saving a parallel dimension where everything ever created by the arts IRL comes alive.
I’d spent over 10 years writing in this universe, but the only bit of it that had been published for people to read was the webcomic and two short stories. I kept writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting the books but was never really satisfied with them enough to publish, because the ideas had all been cooked up when I was like 17 and I was growing out of it.
Also there were a lot of problematic elements deep in the plot and characterization that I had become more aware of over the years as I learned better, and it was really hard to revise them—they were part of the foundation. There wasn’t really any revising them. It was a base structural problem and to change those things would be to basically restart the series from scratch with all new concepts.
Eventually I realized that I needed to move on, but after worldbuilding in this one place with a huge cast of characters I loved, I was really intimidated! None of my new ideas could stand up to something that had existed and been built on for 10+ years and hundreds of comic pages and well over 500,000 words, not counting separate drafts of things.
I had to trust that if I stepped away from this world and this idea, that eventually the next thing I worked on would feel just as amazing and exciting and deep. And guess what? It did! The thing I ended up moving onto was the Eternal Library series, and now I love THIS world and THESE characters just as much if not more than the Life in Glory ones. And I’ve actually published it and feel good about that.
6. Let it become compost. Compost is good!
When we spend time developing or writing ideas that we don’t ultimately finish, that time is not wasted. Those ideas are not trash. They’re compost! And compost is good! Every word you put down helps you grow as a writer. The nature of life and death is that some things do have to die in order to sustain life. Energy is never lost, only transferred from one place to another.
So if you end up spending time on stories that “never go anywhere,” that’s okay. It’s just part of the process, and the sooner we accept that, the easier it will be to focus on finishing and sharing other stories with the world. Those dead stories, even if you don’t cannibalize or combine them, end up fertilizing the story fruit you do grow.
CONCLUSION
To reiterate everything we just went through, when dealing with “too many ideas/too much inspiration,” I find it helpful to: not limit myself from having ideas in the first place; prioritize based on interest level and then stay disciplined; allow myself to play around; combine or cannibalize unfinished works/ideas into others; not be too precious about ideas, as there will always be more; and let some things die and become compost that will ultimately enrich my writing life overall.
Do you have any tips or methods for dealing with an overload of ideas that I didn’t mention, or more to add to any one of those points? I’d love to hear your thoughts down in the comments, as well as any questions you might have about my writing process or writing in general! If I have a lot of thoughts in response, I might even include it in my next blog and/or video, when I start making those again :).
Thank you all so much for all your love and support!! <3