Where I store my creative ideas - and how "Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. "
Thank you for coming back to THE WRITING CAFÉ: I’m so very glad you’re here. I reached 100 subscribers this week and I know that Substack isn’t really about numbers but it feels lovely to know that our little writerly, café community is growing. I’m also very much of the school that believes that touching one life is more meaningful than getting millions of likes. I received a handwritten card from a subscriber this week, sharing how I’d encouraged them to start writing, and it meant everything.
Where I Store My Ideas
A Recipe Tin
One of the places I store my writing ideas is a recipe tin. It’s for the ideas that I haven’t yet committed a notebook to. These ideas are often small and half-baked, tiny inklings, overheard conversations, a character description, something that caught my attention that feels important. What I know is that the ideas have a special kind of energy, that they’re worth pinning down, so I scribble them on a record card and store them away in my tin.
I got the idea from the great American novelist, Anne Tyler, who has been a lifelong inspiration. She almost never gives interviews but allowed rare access to her cosy study in Baltimore to the BBC World Book Club presenter, Harriet Gilbert. At the end of the interview, Tyler shared that she had an old recipe tin called ‘The Blue Box’ on her desk and whenever she has an idea, she writers it down on an index card. When she’s stuck for ideas, she dips her hand in and picks out one of the cards and sees if there’s something there. The index cards in her tin also form the beginning of her novel writing process.
“[The index cards] vary from one word - let’s say I’ll be be in the grocery store and I’ll hear somebody use a word in a way I’m not used to or all the way up to a whole little plot that occurs to me when I’m looking at these two people who are behaving strangely on the street and I think, ‘What if one of them was such and such and the other had just told him such and such.’ And so I write all that down. So that can be a very full little index card.
But then they sit there for years and years. I take the lid off to put the card in from time to time and then when it’s time to write a new book, which I begin with no inspiration, I go through every single card, and some of them might have been there for 25 years and I’ve never managed to use them and I don’t have any thoughts about them and all of a sudden, this time, when I go through I say, ‘Oh, yes…’ it’s almost like it starts flowering in my mind…I might pull ten out, twenty out, and then for the next thirty days, I’m sitting there thinking (and it always does end up to be thirty days, not by plan, I don’t know why), I sit looking at these cards and I think about how I can I get all these disparate cards into one novel?”
Anne Tyler talking to Harriet Gilbert on the BBC World Book Club
I love Anne Tyler’s thirty day thinking period, which links to my previous newsletter on how ‘thinking is writing too.’
My Notebooks
Like many writers, I’m on the verge obsessed - no, actually, well off the verge and wholeheartedly obsessed - with notebooks. I tend to fill up two per novel with character profiles, mind maps of scenes, ideas for plot, themes, setting. I allow myself to crack open a new notebook when one of those ideas from the recipe tin feels like it’s got legs - like it has the substance of a novel behind it.
When I’m out and about, like at my local bookstore café, and don’t have my recipe tin to hand, I write new ideas in the back of my notebooks and add a tab. Sometimes I transfer them to the tin, sometimes I don’t. I love how new ideas come to me while I’m working on a creative project. It plays into my theory on momentum - how ideas come while you’re writing, when you’re actively involved in the process, rather than landing on you like a thunder bolt while you’re sitting staring at the blank page.
The more you write, the more ideas will come to you.
In some writing sessions, I’ll find myself constantly flipping back and forth between my work in progress and new ideas that are coming to me at the rate of knots. It’s a lovely feeling.
Emails to myself, texts, voice recording, back of envelopes
Of course, ideas don’t have much of a schedule and can be a disobedient, creeping up on you during the most inconvenient times: when you’re driving or cooking or walking or taking a bath. When this happens, I reach for the closest recording device. I talk into my phone and create a voice memo. I email myself. I grab a piece of junk mail piled up on the kitchen counter and scribble on the back of an envelope. If you have nothing whatsoever to hand, try to find a human or an animal to talk to about your idea. Something about saying it out loud will make it easier to remember later on.
The key is to write it down or to record it in some way. Ideas can be as unruly in their arrival as they can in their way of slipping between your fingers if you don’t pin them down.
With these less organised ways of putting down ideas, I try to be disciplined and write them up later in a notebook or on an index card in my recipe tin. Though, of course, I’m not always disciplined and the envelope might linger on that pile for months until I nearly throw it out and then I’m jolted by the idea I had and that can be a lovely serendipitous moment too.
How do you record your creative ideas? Do any of the above speak to you? I’d love to know.
Writing Prompt
I’ve been thinking a great deal about the power of place and setting recently - see my recommendation and video below. This is a prompt that gets under the skin of the places that matter to you - or to your character. It’s a great prompt if you’re writing memoir too.
Answer each question quickly, without thinking too much, and then choose your favourite answer and write about it for 10 minutes non-stop. No looking back. And remember that ‘place’ can be interpreted in any quirky way your imagination takes you: a car, a tree, a swimming pool, a bathtub, an airplane, a city or continent or a chair. Have fun with it. See where it takes you.
A place where you were happy.
A place where you were miserable.
A place where you were angry.
A place where you had your first intimate experience.
A place you found exciting.
A place where you felt safe.
A place where you felt frightened.
A place where you were lonely.
A place you’d like to return to.
A place you disliked or disliked in the past.
A place you never want to see again.
A place where you felt loved.
A place where you loved.
A place where you made friends.
A place where you made an enemy or enemies.
A place where you were ill.
A place where you were shocked.
A place that inspired you.
A place where you lost something important.
A place where you felt uncomfortable or upset.
A place you’d like to live - if you could.
A place you remember from your favourite book or film.
(Prompt inspired by Margret Geraghty’s The Five Minute Writer.)
Adapting your writing prompt
Give these questions to a character you’re working on and see what you learn about them. You might unearth something important that plays into the story and into the character’s longings, desires and relationships.
Interestingly, the British master of detective novels, P.D. James, always started with setting:
“For me the novel invariably begins with the setting…After the setting comes the characters, and only then do I give thought to murderous intentions, suspects and alibis, and the mechanics of plot.”
Recommendations:
Learning from other writers: The BBC World Book Club
I learned about Anne Tyler’s ideas tin by listening to The BBC World Book Club. When I was in the UK, I’d attend live recordings, which was such a thrill. The podcast is the most wonderful treasure trove of interviews with authors from around the world and the recordings are all an hour long so they go really deep. Harriet Gilbert is a glorious interviewer. It’s just wonderful. They’re interviewing Ann Patchett next!
A warm-hearted, quirky British rom-com which is also provides an interesting look at the ‘what-if’ of creativity - who ideas come to and why and when and how and who idea belong to, in the end: Yesterday.
I stumbled on this when I was in need of some spiriting lifting after a trying day with the little ones and the film did just that - but also had a lovely philosophical message about creativity that reminded me of something Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about in Big Magic: that ideas are floating around in the ether all the time, just waiting for us to channel them. See the full quotation below.
You can watch the trailer for the film here. The film is on Amazon Prime.
A Good Read: True North by Andrew Graff
I’ve just finished this novel and it’s a great mix of adventure and family drama. I love, most of all, it’s deep dive into married life. The novel is told from alternating points of view between the wife, Swami, and the husband, Sam. With their three children, they pile into their camper and head to the town of Thunderwater in Wisconsin’s Northwoods to run a rafting business in the hope of a fresh start. Of course, it’s never that easy.
On the same theme as this week’s writing prompt, I did a little video on one of the craft elements I enjoyed in this novel (Put Your Setting To Work) in my WRITING FROM FICTION SERIES, which you can find on my Instagram page.
A quotation to chew over this week:
“I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
(You can find Liz here on Substack:
)Thank you for reading, for writing, for sitting with me in our cosy little writing café for another week. Let me know what you enjoyed, what you’d like to see more of and, if you feel so inclined, do subscribe, re-stack and drop me a comment - I love hearing from you.
With love and keep writing,
Virginia 🤍
Coming-Up Next Week
Join me, same time, same place, with your notebook and your favourite mug for a reminder of how comparison is the thief of joy (and how it makes me wobble off my yoga mat), along with more inspiration, motivation, prompts and recommendations.