Idea Hoarding Like It’s the End of the World
Be honest, how many notebooks do you have sitting half-filled on your desk, brimming with short one-liners for an amazing story idea that popped into your head while you were sleeping?
How many characters have you created for that idea, left halfway realized before moving onto the next.
Doomsdayers hoard food, weapons, and medicine.
Writers hoard ideas.
It’s the concept that the next big story is just a thought away. Hiding somewhere deep in our minds, desperate to escape. It is a deep itch that needs to be scratched, so we open our Notes App while we’re showering and talk-to-text “woman meets homeless man on street, is long-lost dad maybe?” We stockpile first and last names that will look great on the page. And while these little notes and lists pile up we feel a bit of ease, knowing that somewhere in that unorganized mess of letters is the “Big One” that will propel us into the annals of famous screenwriters (all ten of them) or onto the New York Times bestseller list.
The problem comes when we can’t bear to rid ourselves of old, unused ideas.
It’s the same as someone who hoards old magazines. Somewhere in their brains the hoarder thinks that, while those magazines hold no discernible value to others, there will be deep, painful consequences for throwing them out. The hoarder bullies themselves into believing that the second they throw them out that’s when they’ll need them the most.
Writers can have this same feeling with their ideas. What if that slip of paper holds the key to a door in our minds? So our collection of notebooks begin to stack up, to the point that even if we did want to revisit that one idea from that one day, it’s impossible to sort through all of the coded words and sentences that no longer make any sense.
“A lack of functional living space is common among hoarders,” states an article from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Consider that a lack of functional brain space is common among writers who hoard their ideas.
It’s important to make space for fresh ideas, and to act on those ideas. There is no point in storing ideas for a rainy day. The more single-sentence loglines you write down for “later”, the less likely you are to sit down and write on a single idea. Anyone can come up with a premise, but it is the writer’s job to take that premise and create a world, fully developed characters, conflict, and every other aspect of story that is necessary to make a successful book/script/whatever.
Ideas aren’t the bad guy here. It’s the failure to act on those ideas and make room for new ones that is. Writers need to be able to turn on the fountain, but it is also important to know when to shut it off to focus on the project at hand.
The idea hoarding that I’m talking about is in lieu of following through. It is safer to fill notebooks with ideas than sit down with a single idea and build it to completion. We cart those notebooks from house to house, filling boxes and then shelves with unrealized ideas. It becomes our creative baggage.
I am guilty of idea hoarding, and of starting off on one idea then pivoting to a new one, and eventually abandoning them both. It happens, but our job as writers is to calm our minds enough to be able to see our creative projects from inception to resolution. And maybe that process would be smoother if we let our creative baggage, and our idea hoarding, take a back seat to doing the work, one idea at a time.