When I first started writing a weekly column, back in 2005 for Anne at the Fallon Star Press, people would ask where the ideas came from each week. Didn’t I ever run out of things to write?
Ideas would come at the strangest times. And they still do. Driving down the road and you hear a funny phrase and think, “Oh, that’s a column.” Or something happens, and you can see a lesson wrapped in the way the drama unfolded — that’s a column.
I used to keep a manila folder on my desk labeled IDEAS, and in that were scraps of paper, restaurant napkins, Post-its, anything lying around when the idea struck that would hold ink. On Wednesday mornings, when the column was due, I would reach for the folder and rummage through the scraps and lists until I found one that grabbed me and looked like it might have potential.
But now deadlines are Tuesdays, and the IDEAS folder is instead a file on my phone in the Notes app called “writing.”
Inside there is the funniest assortment of quips, blurbs, and sometimes just a word, typed out in haste with no telling what I was thinking at the time. And it’s not as fun to rifle through as the paper file was. No pieces of evidence to help jar a story loose.
It may have been a better system back in the day. The item on which the note was scrawled would often provide clues to where I had been at the Eureka moment. Who I was with, maybe what the conversation would have been. On my phone, these little, sterile digital tracks are documented, but unless I also wrote where or who or what I was thinking at the time, sometimes there is absolutely no recollection of what I was thinking — or why this word “unencumbered” or “trails” is even in there.
Or better yet — what’s this one supposed to mean? “Stuck in the desert of the thoughts in your own mind.”
I sort of want to remember what the context is around that one.
So while I scroll through the evidence that ideas come from anywhere, I’ll be right here…
...Keeping you Posted.
Rach.
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