Ideas

I get ideas for my writing from a lot of places. Songs, pictures, dreams, other movies and books and video games, and sometimes they simply come from nowhere. I once asked an author where he got the idea for the book series of his I was currently reading, and he looked at me with a blank look in his eye, as if it were the stupidest thing I could have asked. He simply didn't know. One day the idea was simply there, and he rolled with it.

With over three hundred posts on this blog, I can not begin to tell you how many ideas I have had, and tried to use, and still have not. There are days when I sit at my computer, and restart what I am writing at least three times before finally settling on something that I want to write. Some of those ideas will come back, and I'll be more successful on another try. And sometimes that idea will simply vanish.

I've tried writing down ideas I have that don't work out the first time every once in a while. Then, of course, the problem is still remembering. I can read a short prompt that I've written and not recall what it was supposed to be in the slightest. This happens more than I care to admit. And other times, I'll read the prompt and be inspired to write something entirely unrelated.

There are lots of reasons some of these ideas don't work. Sometimes they just don't sound right. Sometimes I realize I don't have anything more than a title or a first sentence. Sometimes I don't want to just be rewriting the game or movie that gave me the idea in the first place. That one in particular seems to happen a lot. I guess I just play too many video games.

I also have a lot of ideas about the blog. Ideas for things that I want to do, but are too impractical, or new kinds of things that I could write, but that I don't actually want to do.

An excellent example of that is fanfiction. I've written my opinion on fanfiction before, so I don't want to dip into that. But I've written one example of it on the blog, and it was because I was using it as a first draft into a contest. At times I think about doing this more, particularly when I have ideas directly from games. But it's just not something that I'm overly interested in doing.

Another such idea came from the way the blog itself works. When I was learning the ins and outs of what I can do with it, I saw that I could fairly easily add pictures to posts. I had a great idea about posting fan art that people drew based on some of the things I had written.

But that requires having fans first.