Against the better judgment of my inner voice, I may have implied I’m a serial killer to the new neighbor that just moved in next door.
And that I bury the corpses in my garden beds.
Let me back up. I’ve been experimenting with a new (to me) approach to fostering creativity inspired by reading James Vanderbeek’s Wonderbook:
If you reward your imagination by writing down your ideas and exploring them, even the slightest little fragment, your imagination will reward you with a more or less continuous stream of ideas.
So that’s what I’ve been doing. Capturing every little snippet, asking the dumb questions, following the often illogical paths. And so far I’ve been rewarded with vivid and disturbing dreams almost every night, and one conversation in which I could have scared away my new neighbor.
It went like this.
My kind and lovely new neighbor said he’s ordering a large dumpster and invited us to use it if we want. What great luck! I explained that we’re planning to renovate our bathroom and might need to chuck out a musty shower.
“I imagine it’s rather like a dead body,” I suggested, even as my mind was telling me to shut up, don’t be weird. “A bit difficult to break into pieces, and messy, too.” This was only the second time I’d spoken to this man, with his rake in hand, just trying to do lawn work.
Without missing a beat, he responded: “So that’s why you have so many garden beds.” His eyes flicked down to my spring harvest, as if impressed by my cunning to hide it right beneath the kale, my thriftiness to recycle death into salad.
“Why do you think the plants are so lush?” I was thrilled that he passed the ball of weirdness back to me. This was the best game of sportsball I’d ever played.
“That’s a blackberry bush—thorns, right? No one would want to dig that up.” A perfect hiding spot.
“I read too much.” I felt compelled offer some sort of explanation. I don’t actually commit murders, I just read about them in excruciating detail for entertainment.
Creating systems to support your imagination
Neighborly chats aside, I’ve run into a new problem: How do I organize all these new ideas I’ve committed to noting down?
I don’t want them to be lost in a jumble I never revisit. Sending them to my iPhone notes purgatory feels a lot like burying a proverbial body in the garden, never to surface again.
Have you already solved this problem? Hit reply and tell me about your organization system for your writing ideas and snippets.
Your next YouTube rabbit hole: A casual curriculum
As I figure out my own system, I thought I’d share some videos that have given me some great ideas.
- ​Writing tools ranked by tier. One writer’s opinion, a pretty thorough review. He differentiates between general writing tools and those designed to perform a single function. Sent me on a tangential quest to discover the provenance of the tier-ranking structure (which my fellow video gamers may recognize). Did you know it originated in the Japanese academic grading system?
- ​How one author plans and organizes details for her WIP in Notion. If you’re already a Notion user, this might feel intuitive to you. Notion is where I’m capturing all of my raw and random writing ideas in a database. This template inspired me to build some similar sections in my own Notion.
- ​How one author designs complex storylines using Plottr. For those wanting a peek inside a fellow writer’s brain and to see her maximalist approach to plotting (even if it isn’t for you). She combines multiple plot structures, romantic subplots, character arcs, and more on a single grid. A tool can only do so much; our brains have to know the possibilities of how to use said tool. I can see using this after you’ve begun to define a specific idea/premise for a novel and are ready to firm up some of the contours of the story.
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