Mike King

odds & ends of the day and about ideas

April 29, 2004 on 5:14 pm | In Life in General | Comments Off

Today was not a good day to stay on schedule. But still, I did get a lot done. Sort of.

Got a haircut, worked on some story notes for my daughter’s book. Some hundred odd words or so. Not a lot of progress, but better than zero words. Spent the morning doing email, which took a little longer than expected (and I still haven’t caught up on everyone I should be writing to). Straightened up my work area. Which, if you could see it, is actually quite a daunting task. Didn’t make much headway, but I did sort things into various piles for further sorting and purging.

Wandered through Neil Gaiman’s site some more. There’s a great essay here about where ideas come from. Here is one of the best parts:

Every published writer has had it – the people who come up to you and tell you that they’ve Got An Idea. And boy, is it a Doozy. It’s such a Doozy that they want to Cut You In On It. The proposal is always the same – they’ll tell you the Idea (the hard bit), you write it down and turn it into a novel (the easy bit), the two of you can split the money fifty-fifty.

I’m reasonably gracious with these people. I tell them, truly, that I have far too many ideas for things as it is, and far too little time. And I wish them the best of luck.

The Ideas aren’t the hard bit. They’re a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.