Ideas. We all have them, all the time. Everything starts with an idea. Every book, every song, every painting, every fan film… every work of art and creative expression you can think of.
But how do you have better ideas and more of them? How do you keep having ideas, even if most of the ones you have never get turned into something? Where does an idea come from? What is it that sparks your creativity to come up with an idea for something that doesn’t exist yet? What do you do when it seems you have too many ideas and not enough time to act on them all? I’ve got some ideas about that…
Here’s an example of how my having an idea that led nowhere, led to another idea that did.
As writers, we’re always on the lookout for story ideas. Sometimes we get them from within ourselves, sometimes from overheard snatches of dialogue on the street or at work. An idea might come as a result of reading a news story, or an article about the anniversary of something.
While I was doing some research on what’s in the Public Domain, I came across the fact that George Orwell’s 1984 is now in that very place.
UK Copyright Law says an author’s copyright on his work expires 70 years after their death. Since Orwell died in 1950, that means this year, 2020, is the first year when anyone can write another novel about Big Brother, Thought Crime, or Winston Smith. And that was when I had an idea…
If 1984 is out of copyright, then there’s nothing to stop me or anyone else writing another story with the same characters or set in the same world, a sequel or a prequel. You could call it 1985…
I got quite excited by this idea, so much so that my enthusiasm propelled me into knocking up a mock cover. You should always mock up a cover for that book you plan to write. I always do, it’s standard practice for me. If it’s not standard for you, it should be.
You don’t need either skill or training in graphic design, all you need is an eye for what’s eye-catching. When it comes to mocking up your book’s cover, Canva is your best friend. And best of all it’s free!
Hint: Being able to see your book’s cover, having an idea of what the finished product will look like, gives you two advantages over other would-be authors: A] it helps make your book more real to you and B] it helps you focus on getting the thing finished.
Every self-published author knows that the hardest part of being a self-published author isn’t the author-ing, it’s the marketing. Very few natural authors are also natural marketers. Especially when it comes to the ingenuity required by Zero Budget Marketing.
Self-published authors need an understanding of how to make the packaging of their product as clickable as possible. Books sold online don’t just need a great plot and compelling characters. They need clickability, which starts with your cover.
Your book is, don’t forget, a product that has been created in order to be sold and, hopefully, bought by enough people to help make the poor author a bit less poor.
Alas, my idea for a novel called 1985 wasn’t going to be one of them…
The first thing you do when you have an idea, after writing it down so you don’t forget it[!], is to Google your idea to see if anyone’s already beaten you to it. You can see where this is going…
In the case of my idea for a sequel to 1984 called 1985, they had. Twice. First Gyorgy Dalos and then Anthony Burgess. Which was really disappointing.
But there’s no such thing as a wasted idea. There are only ideas that you can’t find a way to use or, in the case of my proposed 1985, re-purpose for another project.
Which is what led me to my next idea…
Doing some research on ideas and where they come from and all that, I came across a fascinating blog post by the author and teacher Jessica Able on the concept of Idea Debt. Which, at it’s simplest, is this:
You have Idea Debt when you spend more time thinking about your idea than actually making it.
I’ve certainly had serious Idea Debt in the past, but now I’m in the process of paying those debts off. One word at a time.
Hint: If you want to spend more time actually creating than thinking about creating, write your ideas down. When you write them down, and you see them written down, it brings them into focus. Which means you can start working on them instead of wasting time thinking about how to make instead of actually making them!
There’s something about seeing your idea written down that helps your mind focus on it. It can also help you identify whether an idea is any good or not if you can’t summarise it concisely in a few sentences. That’s why authors are always advised to work on the Elevator Pitch for their story.
Yes, it’s all in your head and you can see it and it’s fantastic and marvellous and all the rest of it. But if you can’t explain it your non-author best friend in a way that makes sense, then what chance do you think your potential readers have?
Writing down your ideas is, I think, a really good idea. I find it leads to you having more ideas, not less. Of course, having better ideas would be better than simply having more ideas, but you need to start where you’re at.
Which is what I did. And thinking about writing down your ideas so you don’t forget them is what led me to create the My Great Ideas! Idea Journals…
When it comes to how we capture our ideas, nowadays we have plenty of App-based options to choose from. But there’s still something about doing things the Old Skool way and writing them down.
What do you do when you get an idea for a book title, a character or a scene, a dialogue moment or a plot point? If I’m at my PC, I make notes in Evernote or Scrivener. If I’m at work and I get an idea, I either scribble it down on a handy bit of paper or, if I’m on my break, I use the Voice Recorder app on my phone and speak it out before I forget it.
The problem isn’t so much taking and making notes of our ideas, it’s keeping them organised. And the more notes you have, the easier it is to get them in a muddle.
And what do you do if you’re the sort of Creative who has lots of ideas for different things? Not just books and novels, but songs, videos, blogposts or podcasts. Then there are all those business ideas you have, or ideas for things that could be income generators.
Any one of them could turn out to be The Big Idea, but if you either can’t find them or, worse still, you forgot to write them down, you risk losing them forever.
Thinking about this whole business of how we capture our ideas, I concluded that it would be great if I had an Ideas Journal, where I could record my ideas for various creative projects and keep them all in one place where I could easily find them.
A quick search on Amazon didn’t really turn up what I was looking for. So I made my own.
I called it My Great Ideas! which I think is as catchy a title for an ideas journal as you can get. ‘Cos, even if they turn out to be not quite so great after all, in the moment when you have it, every idea is a great idea.
Now before you think that this post is merely a cunningly disguised sales page, it isn’t. What follows is what I had to go through to create the darn thing so you’re better prepared than I was if you ever do something similar. It took a while but, as always it seems, there were some challenges along the way…
First thing to say is that I’ve had the idea for An Ideas Journal for a while now. I liked the idea of having a journal where I could keep track of all my ideas for all the different things I have ideas for. All in one place. Such a thing didn’t exist so I made one.
I don’t know about you, but I find there’s something about writing things down that helps you retain them. My memory retention seems to be better if I actually write it down someplace instead of typing it in a note at my PC, which comes with the aforementioned problem of knowing how to find it again.
The idea of being able to pick up an actual physical book and flip through the pages where I’ve got all my ideas for books, all my ideas for novels, all my ideas for videos etc was one that I found a lot more appealing than searching for them on my Hard Drive.
The pages for the journal, as well as the cover, were created in Canva. I’ve had a Canva account for ages but never used it until now. It was grazing on YouTube that sparked the idea for actually making this idea real, thanks to a Barbara Everett tutorial video that appeared in my sidebar playlist – Creating Journals With Canva. [I’ve put the link for the video at the end of the post in case you want to watch it]
My Great Ideas! was, and is, intended for people like me, people who have different ideas for different areas of creative expression, not just books or novels. So the first thing I had to do was locate icons for each of the different sorts of ideas people like me have.
With that done I then had to put together an explanation page – How To Use This Journal – showing readers how to fill in the various sections of the page. I did this by duplicating the page and adding in the explanatory text. After which, I ended up with this:
So you start off by writing in the date on which you had the idea. Then you number the idea in the lightbulb on the right.
For Creatives like me, there are two good things about this.
The first is that you can see how many ideas you’re having and when, especially if you put the time in as well as the date. That can help give you a pointer as to whether you’re a morning or an evening sort of person, and even which days seem to be the ones on which you get most of your ideas.
Then you circle one or more of the icons, depending on what sort of idea it is. For instance:
Book + Paintbrush: You’ve had an idea for your book cover, what a character looks like or maybe the layout of where a scene is set.
Pencil + Headphones: You’ve had an idea for a blog post that you can re-purpose into an item for your podcast. Or maybe the other way round.
Play Button + Cash: You’ve had an idea for an online course that could generate some income using video tutorials. Etcetera, etcetera…
Then you write down as much detail about your idea as you can and what you need to do to make it happen, which is what separates the good, actionable ideas from the not so good or resource-deficient ideas you’ve had.
Hint: Creativity Rule Number One is never throw an idea away. Just because it’s not actionable now, doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future. If you throw away an idea that’s un-actionable by you now, I can guarantee it’ll be actionable by someone else later on…
With all that done, the next step was to duplicate the pages to get enough to make a decent-sized, printable journal. From start to finish, creating the initial document in Canva took me about seven hours.
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