Far too often we hear the phrase write it down. Write everything down, just sit down and write, no matter how bad, get it outside your head. How often do we have a great idea, and it just walks away like it never knew us? Yeah, all the freaking time.
So it's advice time again. Keep a notebook handy, so useful for a million different things. I used to keep a sketch book. They were often as full of drawings as fragments of poems, shopping lists, strange phrases from questionable states of consciousness. Mad, messy notebooks. They are great repositories that can help clear your head so you can work.
These days everyone has a phone or two in their pocket. Great if you want something small and super useful for keeping notes. I used to use mine to keep notes and then email them to myself for later editing or archiving. It was a good system. It gave me an emergency backup in case of a disk failure. In fact, Gift of Ravens was written almost entirely on a Blackberry Curve during breaks and downtime at work. I would write a bit, then press send at the end of a break and have a nice little package to look over later.
These days I use Google Keep. Now I don't have to save or email, everything is cross platform and instantly available. Having access to Docs is also super useful, but I do find editing on a phone super tedious. Not that typing on a tiny phone keyboard is satisfying. Lets call it tolerable, necessary.
Anyway, what inspired this post is sort brainstorming ideas for short stories I recalled a few way old ideas from my film days. I think both of them were verbal pitches over beer kind of ideas. You know, stuff I should have wrote down and never did.
I had recalled one story, lets call it Heart Attack for now. At least I think its that one. It could easily have been another idea we can call Werewolf.
Heart Attack was an idea for a music video, inspired by a vision I had when walking into a huge mall. It is a surreal exploration of the experience of dying. I can't say much more about it other than I had thought it would make a good adaptation for a short story instead of a music video. Well, me being the most smartest person ever, I failed to write. it. down.
Fuck.
My brain started doing its little dance trying to recall what I was thinking about twenty minutes ago and ADHD came over to play pranks on me and here we are. No story idea but struggling to remember one.
In that furious scrambling of brains I recalled another pitch from way back. This one a more traditional monster movie about a werewolf. Again I have to play the secrecy card not for fear the idea will get stolen, more so I don't lose the passion to tell the story. I knew it wasn't the right one but it sort of struck me as an ah-ha moment. It was both another idea for an adaptation for a short story, and also the idea you are reading right now.
So there you go. Write that shit down or lose it forever. Use whatever you like, apps, notebooks, stacks of paper, napkins, whatever, just put it on paper.
Now I'm off to take my own advice.
Thanks for reading,
Pete
