Karl Whitney: Why it’s a good idea for writers to jot down all their random thoughts

But that book will invariably have begun as a single idea that took hold — and will most likely have been one of many that you had that day or week.

A good idea can easily be lost. You think of it while catching a bus and have forgotten it by the time you’ve settled down in your seat. What was that amazing idea again? Too late: It’s gone.

Then, how might you keep track of those, potentially very useful, ideas? In 2010, I began to keep a Word document that I called ‘Article Ideas’, but subsequently expanded to include book ideas and other reflections on what I should write next.

Each idea is rarely more than a sentence in length, and some ideas, which have been noted down quickly and never revisited, are encapsulated in a single word. (One idea, from about a decade ago, simply, but effectively, reads: ‘Landlords?’)

When I look back on the document now, I can see that some of the ideas that I considered as articles were expanded upon and became chapters in my first book. But many others were left behind, not necessarily because they were bad, but because they weren’t right for me. You become discerning about what might work and what might not — and try not to waste time. (But, of course, wasting time is a near-inescapable part of the writing process.)

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of travelling. My old routine of sitting at a desk all day has become impossible, so I’ve been trying to carve out time, here and there, for writing. 

To be honest, I’ve mostly been thinking and not writing. When you leave yourself alone in this way for long enough, you might well discover what you truly want to do next. 

Instead of writing down every idea, you’ll find yourself turning around one bigger idea and wondering how you might best approach it.

Sometimes, the structure you’ve erected to generate ideas and writing might not function in the way you had anticipated. Instead of wanting to do something, you feel obliged. One of the downsides of the rationalisation of manufacturing during the industrial age was the alienation of workers from the product of their labour. When you begin to crank out ideas without gauging your own interest in them, it can get a bit soulless.

There’s a phrase that’s often attached to film projects that go nowhere: They’re trapped in development hell. Rights to a book might be bought, a writer and director engaged, press releases pumped out to generate a bit of interest and then… nothing. Meetings happen, but nothing goes anywhere. Executives at the studio move on, enthusiasm for the project collapses, the director takes on the next film, and the whole thing remains on the books, but never emerges.

As time goes on, and I’ve generated more ideas and written more work, I’ve learned to see that there are different levels of development hell. Sometimes, you’ll write something, submit it, and never hear of it again. Occasionally, you take it into your own hands and squash your idea at an early stage, because you can see that it’s going nowhere. The idea stays an idea, preserved among other ideas listed in a file on your laptop.

At other times, I’ll have seen my writing in a PDF document, typeset, and ostensibly ready to go, but it will never reach the page. And then there are the endless, supposedly creative conversations you might have with agents, editors, and producers (TV or radio) about ideas that could well happen, but more likely won’t.

I once spent a couple of aimless-if-enjoyable days driving around with a director, discussing and pitching ideas for programmes that, once they had been talked through and the required brainstorming had happened, had become exactly the sort of thing I wouldn’t want to do. I understood that, to some degree, this was the game, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had merely stumbled into another circle of development hell in an industry parallel to my own.

So, how do you keep going? Sometimes you don’t. You disengage and daydream about anything else. But, invariably, you write, not because you want acclaim (although that would be nice, thanks). You write because of some inner compulsion that keeps you going through the bumpy periods, which might last quite a while.

Your strength as an artist, at those times, is expressed not through critically acclaimed or even best-selling books; it’s shown privately, quietly: by not turning away from what you feel is the right thing to do, which is to continue writing.

So how do you choose what idea to pursue and what to set aside? When you come up with ideas for things you’d like to write about, you switch your inner critic off and just say whatever comes to mind. No one else is going to see your list of ideas, so you can’t get it wrong.

It’s only when you come to revisit that list and gauge your enthusiasm for each that you find out what you think. This is when the critic emerges, and you begin to think more deeply about what you propose to do. But, even then, you can scoop up some of the ideas that you’re drawn to and expand them on the page. Under a heading or a series of headings, extend the central idea to see if it has legs.

Writing consists of a sequence of choices we make between first deciding to write and finally finishing a piece of writing. Key choices are made before we write our first draft. Then there are further choices we make — Why this sentence and not that one? Should I include this person’s perspective and not that person’s, and what effect will that have on the narrative? — as everything narrows into a tunnel of our own construction that leads inexorably towards the terminus: The finished work.

Ideas, then, are the first step in trying to constrain the endless freedom that the world presents to you as an artist. The choices you make express your judgment. Just because one person has written about a certain subject doesn’t mean you have to emulate their work, but it might inspire you to approach the same thing in a different way.

There are ups and downs in every career. There are quiet periods, when it seems like nothing is happening and you fear that nothing will ever happen again, when the blank page feels like a rebuke to the illusions you hold about being a writer. At those points, I don’t necessarily turn to the work I’ve published, but rather to the collection of ideas I’ve assembled over the years.

So much focus is put on the finished product that the writer can easily forget that the process starts with one small idea that can keep you going for years.