In my Notes app, I have 32 notes with the title or phrase “Story Idea”. A few of them have more than one idea, but the majority are just a single sentence or paragraph.
On my laptop, buried and scattered across many different folders, I count 35 unfinished stories, notes, first drafts, and projects that could be called story ideas. I’d need to actually go through them to determine how many unique ideas are in there, though: some of them are duplicates from having multiple backups copied into one directory.
On my desktop computer, I did not find any notes or story ideas.
(The Voice In The Back of My Head smirks and snorts in derision.)
That’s 65 or so notes that could become stories. OK, sure, that’s not as many as I thought. But it still ain’t nothin’. But wait! There’s more.
I have 101 posts saved in the same editor I’m using to type this post, the WordPress editor, that are saved as Drafts. There we go. These are all distinct from the previous notes. In large part, they’re posts I started writing and then abandoned for one reason or another: probably a lack of mental energy; or depression; or not having any idea where it could go; or realizing I needed to think the idea through some more; or more research, before I could continue. But, again, that ain’t nothin’.
Baby steps. Now I know the scope of what my past self thought was good enough to at least write something down. Here’s Future Brian, taking a look.
More to come.