Dealing with Overflowing Ideas

What the title says. I tend to overflow with ideas. At present, I have two concepts I'm simultaneously polishing before selecting which one to work on first... but by the time I'm done working on the first one, I'll probably have 10 more notable ones lined up, as usual.

So I must ask... how do you deal with cases where you have too many ideas? How do you decide what to write first if you have two premises that both seem interesting?

For you, I suggest you concentrate on one (or two) of your best ideas and brainstorm from there.

Archive through text whatever 'extra' ideas you get, never going beyond a blurb, and focus on what you're doing right now. Revisit them if you feel it's convenient.

This works for me.

Try to actually write something based on either concept. Or write an outline for one of the concepts. You won't find out which is the better idea by analyzing them to death — go and get your hands dirty.

Suffer a data crash. Worked wonders for me.

But, actually - occasionally just writing them all down - then carefully physically tearing a whole lot up that don't mesh is a great way to try to get your head to stop wanting to use them.

Deleting them in digital? Just doesn't get the message through to the brain in the same way.

Merge them all into one huge mess of a setting.

Actually, I do with the ones that would make sense together, but not to the point where it becomes a mess.

^^ To expand on that, merge the elements that interest you in each setting. Often there's only one character I really like in a setting that's otherwise generic.

edited 5th Feb '12 5:52:27 PM by feotakahari

^^^ and ^^ : Agree. The ides that can exist within one setting, I use within one setting. Everything that doesn't fit into the story I'm working on at the moment gets put away for later use.

edited 5th Feb '12 5:53:52 PM by fanty

As most people here say, merge. If you have a big empty space- a villain that's just too generic here, a boring hero somewhere else- figure out how to make them hate each other, then write about it. If your story isn't long enough, you have a ready-made subplot.

I actually played around with that with one of the two concepts I said I was working with in the OP. I turned a protagonist from another idea I had quite a long time into an Anti-Hero supporting character. It helped that I didn't expand on that character in my head yet, so the merge was completely seamless.

Though, I suppose it looks like I'll have to go with Triple Elation's idea and write out each one to see which of my ideas to work with right now.

Incorporate what's useful to current works. Discard what's not. Don't write it down. If it's that good you'll remember it when needed. Be brutal about this. If you have to stretch it to make it fit, then don't try.

An interesting exercise that I like to try from time to time:

Write down your ideas in little six-word summaries until the total of written ideas makes a power of two. Then randomly pair them up and, for each pair, double the word count and either:

• Elaborate on one and discard the other.
• Combine the two into a single idea.

I don't think you should merge ideas together just for the sake of merging them. Even if both ideas "work" within the parameters of what you're writing, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to use both of them unless they improve upon your plot or storyline or characters as a whole. Otherwise it's just like shoehorning different tropes into your story with no regard to whether they actually make your writing better or not.

Not to mention that an overabundance of ideas can easily muddle and overcomplicate your story. People who want to write often stall due to just that; they keep coming up with "great ideas" and trying to add them in until they get overwhelmed and sucked into a vortex of planning and worldbuilding and never finish their story. The harsh truth is that not all of your ideas will make it to the printed page, and that's true of any writer.

So when you do come up with a new idea, I highly advise against automatically stuffing it into your work, whether it would work with your setting or not. Unless you are absolutely positive that this idea IS something that should be incorporated into what you're currently working on, write it down and save it for later. It'll still be there when you're done with your current project, and if it's good enough, you'll be able to build upon it then.

I actually strongly disagree with the delete camp. In my experience, deleting/junking an idea so you can focus on another one has two effects:

1. You'll be distracted from the main work thinking about the one you trashed and wondering whether it was better or whether you should have gone with it. Since it's gone, you'll never know. (Seriously, I deleted a story when I was 11 and it still bugs me.)

2. It makes it much harder to finish things. When you're hitting a rough patch in one work and you think of a new idea, it becomes very tempting to abandon your old thing and start up the interesting new project if the other option is to junk it.

So I keep a notebook where I write down my story ideas. Knowing that I have them written down and can return to them at any time allows me to forget about them and focus on what I'm currently doing. (I've finished five novels with this method.)

Three things I personally like to do that you could possibly do yourself:

1. Incorporate that idea into the story. Assuming that the tale is expansive enough—and that you feel that you are capable of doing all concepts proper justice without making the reader's head explode—this can kill a number of birds with a single stone, at least in the short run.
2. Write down the idea and put it to the side, preferably in some sort of "rainy day file" for future reference. In the long run, this one can be quite convenient, but it can be hard to stomach if you want an immediate resolution to your problems. (Note: Ray Bradbury did this; if I recall correctly, he ended up with a room full of filing cabinets, all filled with unused story ideas.)
3. If you feel that you could not do the idea justice yourself, give it to someone else who you know can. This is perhaps the most difficult on numerous levels, yet it can also be one of the most rewarding of the three.

I do a lot of indiscriminate merging, and I also keep an idea pile that grows rather quickly. Also, I'm relatively confident that I will never run out of ideas, so it's not comparatively that much of a wrench to shelve one. Especially since many of mine are just throwaways based around a scene or a character archetype; the bigger, more complete concepts tend to form by agglomeration.

Flip a coin. (No really, that's what I often do in this situation.)

Or work on two ideas at the same time; there's no shame in that.

And do write the other ideas down so you can return to them when you finish the current one.

I inscribe my many ideas to paper, and then put it in my white 5-gallon bucket.

edited 7th Feb '12 6:11:57 AM by EldritchBlueRose

I have a notebook that is literally just ideas. I have another notebook for planning out stories. I keep all my ideas, I put some into my stories, I insert more ideas into the story if it looks interesting and plausible enough.

I find the reactions to the delete concept interesting, considering it's the only way that I've ever managed to accomplish anything. (jewelled's second objection to it, in particular, does not follow in the slightest from what's been said in that case; it's about deleting ideas that aren't useful to your current efforts, not deleting your current effort.)

A writer is human, and has a finite amount of time, energy, and skill. To paraphrase Fredrick the Great, he who writes everything, writes nothing. Short stories, vignettes, forever, may be okay with you (assuming you don't have enough ideas to get distracted from even that, and that happened to me once upon a time). But most people will eventually attempt a novel-length work and a level of focus and discipline will be required to complete it. Better not to tempt yourself away.

I do not reject the idea you cannot work on multiple projects (I have three going myself, though one is deliberately minimalist), but I do think that writing down everything that ever occurs to you will inevitably result in a good deal of wasted time and effort.

edited 7th Feb '12 7:10:48 AM by Night

^ That's assuming that you get loads and loads of ideas all the time. I tend to come up with full-fledged ideas that could carry a story about one or twice per year. To me, the idea of not writing them down almost sounds like flushing gemstones down the toilet.

(When it comes to small ideas that cannot carry a story, I simply merge them with the bigger ones.)

True enough. Incorporation doesn't always work as well with every work, though.

edited 7th Feb '12 7:33:00 AM by Night

It does indeed follow. I'll explain in more detail. Your thesis here is that if you're working on one thing and come up with another (incompatible) idea, you must discard the second entirely to focus on the first—you can't just shelf the second for later.

But the idea you just thought of is, almost by definition, the one that will seem more interesting to you at the moment, and any long work will hit rough patches and get stonewalled now and then. Therefore, you're setting yourself up for situations where idea A doesn't seem to be going anywhere and idea B is new and exciting, and then forcing yourself to discard idea B entirely because "save it for later" isn't an option.

In these situations, it's extremely tempting to just give up on idea A altogether rather than sacrifice idea B, the one you want to be working on. Writing down your ideas for later use allows you to say "Idea B is a great idea and I'll definitely get to it later, but for now I should focus on idea A." That make sense?

Given that no one has suggested "start everything and try to do it all at once" as a viable strategy, you're really arguing against no one here. The question is why you have to actually delete the new idea completely rather than filing it away to use some other time. In fact forcing yourself to completely discard ideas that don't work is tempting yourself away by forcing yourself into a "use it or lose it" dilemma.

Pretty much exactly that. Honestly, I find the idea of rejecting or forgetting about a full-fledged idea (or even just a really good half-formed one) repugnant, not because I think that my thoughts—or anyone else's, for that matter—are always wonderful, but because even a stupid idea always has an element of potential, that being a vital resource. Also, I really don't understand why anyone should have to focus on one idea at a time. Sure, if you think that doing so is a detriment to all of the ideas, or a drain on the one that you consider most important, then it's perfectly reasonable to narrow your focus, but to discard those ideas entirely without at least creating an outline for future use? Blasphemy, I say!