Making ideas work

There are some days that I actually do have a lot of ideas for what I want to write about running through my head, but when I sit down to write about them, it turns out to be a lot harder than I anticipated. This isn't going to stop me, of course, but it may make me put it off until I have more time, or I have a better understanding of how I want to go about it, or what have you. A lot of these ideas come from taking something that is something I come across on a daily basis, but that aren't necessarily easily put into words. Which, of course, is the problem.

One of these ideas that I had recently came from the fact that I have been studying Latin. In Latin, the rules of good language are very different from how they are in English, and I was toying with the idea of writing a piece with good Latin grammar, and seeing how it comes out in English. It's an interesting concept, and certainly an interesting challenge, and it would help me develop a better sense of good sentence structure. However, it lacks an important detail: what I would write about.

In theory you can just apply that idea to any story, but it works a lot better when the idea and the story that you apply it to can actually correlate. I considered using a rewrite to apply that, but I don't much like doing rewrites unless it's something that I'm heavily interested in and want to redo because I'm not happy with the original. Something like that isn't really a good place to be throwing in random ideas for challenging myself. So it kind of requires better planning.

There are lots of ways I can challenge myself in writing similar to this, but they still require having something to actually write about. I'd love to work on making these challenges happen, and it may be something that I want to try focusing on in coming pieces. But unfortunately I continue to have the problem of having an actual story.

This is a problem I have a lot, which I believe I have touched on in the past. I sometimes try to browse different places that provide writing prompts for such things, but I generally find them less than helpful. I very rarely actually use the writing prompts that I am given, though they occasionally do make me think of my own prompts that are completely unrelated. How exactly that works I can't explain, but it happens.

These are the unfortunate problems of writing something new every day. But, they are good problems to have, at least in my eyes. Having to continue to think of things to write about forces me to think creatively, which is not something that happens very frequently. It's difficult, to be sure, and I am less than thrilled with how I have handled that problem as I have been writing, but occasionally it works out. I am very fond of a few pieces I have written, even if they are only a small portion of all I have done, but that's more or less to be expected. It can be discouraging at times, but when I do make the ones I feel I can be proud of, it gives me a rush I don't get many other places.

So when I get ideas, I try to make them work. They don't always do, and more frequently don't, but I do it anyway. And sometimes, when I really like an idea, I come back to it later on down the road, and I try it again. And again. And again. Because I know that each time I do, it will get better, and eventually it will be good. Maybe even great. Although I try not to get too full of myself. Because every idea can be improved. You just have to work on it.