David Baldacci made an interesting comment in his MasterClass. He mentioned how he does not to write down story ideas when they come to him. He avoids the standard advice to keep a notepad and pen on your nightstand. Instead, he feels that any worthwhile story idea will tend to stick around in your head. If it’s good enough, you won’t be able to stop thinking about it, let alone forget it. This is also a <a href="http://<https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LLPe7pguifI>&quot; data-type="link" data-id="concept shared by Stephen King.

While the “nightstand” method really didn’t work for me, I do capture my story ideas. My current method is to jot down the ideas as I get them, typically as a word Doc on my phone. They usually take the form of a of a couple sentences saved with a filename resembling concept for the story. Often something along the lines of “Story idea about AI that lives inside food.DOCX.”  Most of these are rarely revisited. Many of these even get deleted when I look back and shake my head – AI inside of pears? Why did that ever seem like a plausible idea to me?

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t usually have an idea for a true story, but rather I tend to capture the general concepts a story could be built around. For example, “AI food” is a premise that I could work with (yet probably shouldn’t), but that idea tells me nothing of the conflict or of the characters motivations. There is no plot line being described. It’s merely a premise, or perhaps better thought of as a base framework, on which to hang the plight of the characters.

Sometimes a premise can be enough of a spark to get a story started, but I find the real creative work comes as I trudge through getting the story down, line by line, word by word. In Stephen king’s terminology it is where the story is “unearthed.”

I recall a conversation with my mom after she read something I had gotten published. She asked “How did you think of that?”  If you have tried your hand at fiction at all, you know the ideas rarely come to you in full form but rather it is a slow unearthing. You see a bit of something shiny sticking out of the ground that catches your eye so you start to dig away.  You carve out the dirt around it and sweep the surfaces clean until you are able to completely pull it from the soil, hold it up to the light and be in awe you were ever able to get at a thing like that.

That analogy was a bit much to try to explain to my mother, so I think I said something profound like “They just come to me.” It really is something you have to experience to understand. Ideas are only the starting point that lead to more ideas which then, with persistence and practice, morph into craft.

My point being whether you capture your story ideas or not, isn’t even be that important. It’s the ass in chair unearthing that matters much, much more.

Let me know in the comments below how you capture the ideas for your stories.

-James