Ideas are funny things. They come at random moments, and often prove to be so fragile they melt away the moment you take a good, hard look at them. While ideas aren’t worth much by themselves, they are the spark that can ignite the writing kindling and turn into a novel, so they’re kind of necessary. But anyone who’s tried to write a novel knows that ideas can be difficult to control—they’re slippery, and often prove more elusive than you’d like.
I’m not the first person to think of this, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true: The best thing to do with an idea for a novel is to forget it immediately.
What Was I Saying?
It seems a little crazy at first, but it works, trust me. Your first instinct when you have what you think is a great idea is to capture it, to nail it down. If you don’t make some notes, you’ll lose it.
What happens then? Well, you work on it, develop it, and eventually—whether days or weeks or years later—you realize whether or not it’s really worth your time. And if it isn’t worth your time, then all that effort you just sank into it was a waste.
What I’ve found to be true is that instead of trying to capture that idea, you should immediately try to forget it. Just put it out of your mind. Inevitably, the ideas that have real power behind them—the ideas that have the potential to be great books—will come back to you. A week, a month, a year later they’ll be triggered and you’ll remember them. What seems to happen in the mean time is that your subconscious continues to work on the idea, developing it and strengthening it. If the idea doesn’t come back to you, it very likely wasn’t worth your time.
I don’t have anything scientific to put behind this. In my experience when I jump on an idea immediately in a surfeit of enthusiasm, it usually goes nowhere. When I put it out of mind and it returns, it works.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a heavy day of forgetting things and drinking beer to get back to.