Bush Thoughts

I am brimming with ideas. They come to me everywhere I look, everything I see. If I think about it enough, almost any subject will suggest an idea of some kind or another. My head is so bursting with them that I can't even get them all down on paper. They're always-present and ever-elusive. I scribble them in my bedside notebook before sleep claims me and they leak from my skull with the bleary morning light. The only sure way to catch them is to write them down. And if I don't anchor them down in time they evaporate into steam like dew beside a fire.

But the real problem is, even after nailing them down with a solid two-sentence anchor: what do I do with all these ideas?[1]

Because a new idea isn't developed. It isn't clear, nor it doesn't have the maturity of a well-rounded argument. Instead, it's vivid and bright and has a few principles of nature or science, famous faces and a couple of stirring one-liners. But that's it. Like a virus, an idea is powerful, but it won't go anywhere without a human host. Like an embryo, it has incredible potential, but will go nowhere if it's not properly incubated. Before it can be effective, it has to be refined, restructured to flow well, connected to other sciences and great thinkers, given analogies and anecdotes that will resonate with a wider human audience, and finally polished to a gleaming sheen that will glisten in others' minds long after you are gone.

But I don't have time for that.

So what do I do with all these ideas?

Hoard 'em, mostly. It is the sad truth. I would love to turn them all into glorious works and send them out into the world, but that takes time and thought and effort, and as previously stated, I have more ideas than I can develop. So they pile up. Only one in maybe fourteen or fifteen ever see more than a two-sentence paragraph. Sad in'nit?

Perhaps the real reason they pile up is that I don't often stick with one long enough to refine it. The minute I start to refine one idea, it sprouts three more and I just go around collecting more and more idea seeds without ever finishing planting any. This is a common problem seen in microcosm in my essays. I will have a "bush" of ideas. A huge, overgrown, monstrous bushy-bush of ideas that are all connected, but that don't flow in any central theme or purpose. It's just kinda growing everywhich way. I see this in my papers, and my blogposts[2]. Like this one. I was shooting for a three sentence intro, and then the pics and a sweet goodnight and off to bed. Yeah. Didn't happen.

How to fix my ineffectual, rambly bush?

I don't want to stop catching ideas. I just want to order and develop them more. So maybe I can...

1. Plan the trunk -  Figure out what I want to do from the outset. Set my argument-tree[3] growing right while still malleable, and have all the branches tying straight back to the central theme. Cohesive, constructive, purposeful and direct. Might have to throw away the first draft entirely, and start from scratch, but it's possible.
2. Prune the bush - In the words of the mortal Stephen King[4] "Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings." Cut out the fluff. Write to tell yourself the story/argument, edit and cut so it is only the story (or argument). More is not better. A knife point cuts better than a brick.

Yeah, I think that would help. We'll see if I can get a handle on my big-bushy multi-thematical rambles and instead churn out high powered punch-you-in-the-face essays made of nothing but thesis statement and muscle. Until then, enjoy the rambles! They're fun, and the ideas are all so great, how could you pick only one?[5]

[1] Maybe by now I should mention that not all ideas are good ideas? Some of them are just ok. Or bad. Sometimes it's hard to tell until you've worked with them a bit.

[2] Seriously, if you want to see what I mean, read some of my other posts. I would point you to the couch one, but I don't think that's fair. The point of that whole exercise was to write for 30 uninterrupted minutes without any plan or editing.

[3] My argument-tree-metaphor

[4] Never read his horror, but I really liked his book On Writing

[5] These pictures show just some of the list of possible topics for the blog. The "seeds" tab is now the running list of ideas and scraps of blog posts. I think I have five pages in it? We're not even getting into my other sections-- or the stuff in my paper notebooks that I carry around. Yikes.