Creative Writing

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been filling up notebooks with little tidbits of writing. A story line here, the start of an article there. And over time, I’ve managed to stack up about 50 different notebooks of useless information. Then again, maybe it’s not so useless. I can use all that to help with new projects.

Now, maybe I’m the only person who does this, but just in case, all those ideas can be used and reused. I found in one notebook, the idea of writing an article about modern wedding practices from around the world. I wrote it down and forgot all about it. But, now that I look at it again, I can see where that can be turned into several different ideas. For instance, modern practices vs. traditional practices.

For those who write more fiction than non-fiction, keeping dumb little ideas in a notebook is a great idea. I write down all my ideas, no matter how silly they may seem at the time. However, somewhere down the road, those ideas may be the answer we’re looking for to make a good story even better. Or, they may even spark an idea that hadn’t been thought of before.

Also, you can use the same idea over and over again, simply by rewording the piece. Several years ago, I wrote an article on how to start a blog. It wasn’t my best work, but at the time, I thought it was brilliant. Over the years, I’ve reworked that one article at least 3 more times. Each time, I’d add new information while restructuring the old information. In the end, I had 3 very different articles about the same topic.

If you’re a true writer at heart, you never throw away anything. I’ll bet you even have some old napkins or other scraps of paper lying around somewhere with bits of wisdom scrawled upon them. Well, get all those pieces collected and get them put together somewhere safe. You never know when one of those little quips will be your next work of genius.

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