How To Remember Your Ideas

AKA Write It Down

I get ideas for stories all the time. More often than not, however, I can’t stop what I’m doing and expand that thought into a couple of thousand words right then. Therefore, I have to have a way to remember the idea until I can take advantage of it.

This means writing down the idea.

Always.

Don’t trust your memory; trust ink on paper. Then keep track of the paper.

In order to write down my ideas, I must have a pen and paper with me. I don’t carry a purse, so all of my accessories have to fit into the pockets of my jeans or pants. This means both pen and paper must be small and durable.

For a pen, my implement of choice is a Fisher Space Pen. Closed, it is a little over 3.5 inches long. Pull the cap off and attached it to the end of the pen, and it is a very comfortable 5 inches long. It writes in hot or cold weather, underwater, and at any angle, even upside down, if you must. Run out of ink? It’s easy to unscrew the pen, slip out the old cartridge and slide in the refill cartridge.

I’ve had once since they came out, and still carry the chrome model, although today you can get one in a variety of colored finishes and even add a clip attachment.

For paper, I’ve tried a lot of pads, notebooks, and packs of cards. I’ve finally settled on the X-Small Moleskine Notebook. At 2.5 inches by 4 inches, it fits perfectly into the back pocket of my jeans. The outer cover is hardy yet flexible. The X-Small Moleskines come in a variety of colors; my preference is blue or black.

For ideas that appear at night, there’s a legal pad and a pen within easy reach of my bed.

tonbo dreams

For ideas that I’m actively working on, I dedicate a specific, large journal in which to consolidate notes, pictures, doodles – anything and everything that is fueling that idea. If I’m away from the journal and noted something in the Moleskin, that page comes out of the Moleskine and gets pasted into the journal as soon as I can.

Personally, I like large journals or notebooks with a spiral binding. This lets the paper lay flat, and lets me keep a pen in the spiral so I’m not always draining my Space Pen keeping track of stuff.

This back-to-school time of year is great for shopping for notebooks and journals since a lot of them are on sale. I’ll try and find a notebook that has an interesting cover, something that resonates with the story I’m developing.

For ideas that aren’t big enough to demand a large journal, I’d love to tell you how well organized and categorized my little pieces of ideas are. But that would be a lie. Those tidbits, written on Post-it notes and napkins and the backs of receipts are in glorious piles around my house. Every now and then I consolidate them to the desk in my bedroom that would be used for writing except for the fact it is covered in remembered, written down ideas.

Angel: [looks at writing on the walls in Fred's room] Are you gonna remember everything that’s up there?
- Angel, Season 3, “Fredless”

Aug 20, 2009

Tags: journal  |  notebook  |  space pen

Categories: writing