Skip to main content

Index Your Ideas Today (You'll Be Glad You Did)


As a writer, your brain pelts you with ideas on the daily. Every stranger, every mundane event, and even everyday objects can spark something in that overactive imagination of yours. You get ideas at the most inconvenient of times, like when you're driving or dealing with other people.


Wait, does that not sound like you? Do you have a grand total of zero ideas coming at you for most of your life, but then every once in a while you're blessed with a single blindingly brilliant concept?

Regardless, you need a way to manage the ideas you get and spreadsheets are boring. That's where we come in. Read on to discover how we create databases from which to pull inspiration for our myriad writing projects.

Megan gets down her ideas by...

Let's all take a second to remember that I am not the most organized person on the planet. I do try to be, to which my abandoned planners and calendars and weird bullet journal hybrids can testify. What this means is I'm constantly switching out what I carry on a daily basis. Dozens of notebooks in every size have spent time in my purse, all with half-baked thoughts.

Sometimes I don't have my purse or I'm just about to burst with an idea, so I interrupt the conversation I'm having with an actual human and tell Siri to take a note for me. This is probably my most common form of idea-capturing, but again, it doesn't lend itself to an easy access when I'm hungry for inspiration. It's also organized by date, and how the heck is that helpful?

But there is one constant in my organizational schemes, and that constant is Google Keep. I'm a sucker for Google's suite of productivity apps to begin with, but Keep just works so well for what I've always wanted in an idea organization system: color-coding, tagging, checklist-making, you get the picture. When I've got a spare hour and my laptop's handy, I open all my other apps, gather all the scraps of paper at the bottom of my purse, and start transferring everything with one iota of potential over to Google Keep.

Jessica gets down her ideas by...

I’m equally not the most organized person in the universe. The one thing I know I’ll always have on me is my phone. Before I had a phone, I had ideas half jotted down in notebooks and doodled on the back of class assignments.

Since graduating college, I’ve gone mobile, as in my ideas are now put mostly into the notes section. I use iCloud because it’s easy to access across devices and syncs up with my computer with no hassle. When I get too many, I move them into a document. I keep an ideas document, labeled and on the cloud so I can access it any time I’m start thinking about an idea. What happens next? Absolutely nothing. This is where most of my ideas go to spend the rest of their eternity.

Sometimes though I’ll start thinking back to those ideas. I’ll hunt down the original one, copy it into another document, and start working on it. Sometimes these ideas have nothing come of them, sometimes I’ll keep working on them. When nothing happens, I’ll put them back into the ideas document or I’ll move them into a folder of old ideas if I have enough invested in them. Someday I might revisit them, but I never know.

More Suggestions We Love (But Just Don't Use)

Some other great places that you can use to record your ideas, but we personally don't use are....
  • Word processors, like Microsoft Word
  • Post-It Notes
  • Dry-erase boards 
  • Index cards on cork board
  • Trello and other apps (we’ll probably have a post on this eventually, right?)
  • Small notebook that you can keep on your person
How do you get your ideas down? Do you have a system you use to keep track of them? Let us know by commenting below and make sure to subscribe so you can get the latest posts.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Realistic (Lazy) Guide to Plotto

If you're asking yourself what kind of foreign cuisine  plotto  might be, you're on the wrong blog, buddy. Plotto  is a book written by William Wallace Cook, of deforesting-Canada fame. He concocted a formula for plot, wrote a book about it, and now it's super confusing to read. Don't get me wrong. You could totally read the in the front of the book instructions very thoroughly and understand what's going on. But who has that kind of time? Also, since when is following instructions any fun? Let's Mix It up a Little But before we do any mixing up, you'll need a copy of Plotto . My paperback copy was a whopping $18.95 USD I didn't have to pay because it was a birthday present. If you want a tangible book , you can definitely find it on Amazon. If you're cool with a digital copy, however, you can get it for absolutely free .  Bonus: it's searchable. I definitely recommend having access to both. The first thing you'll notice once you...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is Readercoin?

Haven’t so many of us wished to get paid to read? Readercoin seems to be the answer to those prayers. Readercoin is a new app that lets you earn its eponymous cryptocurrency by listening to and reading books. I'm so enamored with this app that I just  had  to share it with you all. It's perfect for someone like me, who has a demanding schedule and little time to read for pleasure. Cryptocurrency? You know, like Bitcoin, except this isn't Bitcoin. It's a currency that's generated by the time you spend reading and listening. I am not, nor do I pretend to be, an expert on how it works. I refer you to the FAQs for that. What I can tell you cryptocurrency can be exchanged for rewards like Amazon gift cards or PayPal at a usual exchange rate of 1,000 Readercoins for one US dollar. For most people, that's probably just as good as cash (and it's almost definitely the closest as you're ever going to get). You also have the option of donating your R...
Post a Comment
Read more

August Writing Goals

Hello August! We're hoping this month provides us with much inspiration and many hours of writing time. Our writing goals in July had to take a backseat to our personal and professional lives. We didn't get around to running those word sprints, but we'll aim to do them in NaNo November. Neither of us met our goals for Camp NaNo. Jessica actually lowered her word count goal during the month when she realized she was deleting more words than what she had added in. For August, we've set some new, more realistic goals based on our time constraints. MEGAN’S AUGUST WRITING GOALS Write some blog posts Rework my daily schedule to include designated writing time now that there's a new full-time job in the picture Finish a short story and submit it for publication somewhere Finish new outline for  Earhart & Noonan's Last Grand Adventure JESSICA’S AUGUST WRITING GOALS Write some blog posts Finish editing and rewrites on this draft version of  Murder...
Post a Comment
Read more