When You Thirst for Ideas, Go Back to the Well You Know

I made an interesting find this morning while cleaning up one of these “messes” that grow ever larger, even when in plain sight on my desk. Well, technically, it was under the desk, but why quibble. I’m telling this story. I can tell it any way I want to do it. I don’t even remember throwing the notebook into the pile. Anyway, it is a standard student’s spiral notebook of about 80 pages. These are one of my favorite choices for writing when away from electricity and a keyboard.

This one survived somehow from the summer of 1995. As I write this, it is March, 2006. Inside, I found fourteen pages of single spaced handwritten notes. They appear to be a continuation of a complete story I vaguely remember writing. A story which I seem to have lost somewhere in the black hole of boxed storage, because I can’t find it on my hard drive. A fast perusal of the material suggests to me that it should easily be able to stand alone as a story by itself, as is.

If I make it my task to get this material typed up and fleshed out as I normally do when I transcribe from handwritten material to electronic files, I should have a very good start to another new book. That makes three incomplete “new” books in the “IN” hopper of my hard drive. Therein lies a lesson for everyone. Never, never, NEVER completely destroy anything you write. Save everything to CD disks as simple text files. Back it up with hardcopy paper files. Back it up to another hard drive.

When the drought is upon you, when you thirst for ideas, go back to the well you know. Yourself. What you have done before. The writing work that you have already done. That creative spark is still there. That is enough to reignite the wettest wood. Enough to light up the black coals of doubt. To turn you back into a hot vibrant flame of continued amazing stories. The fuel is there, you just need that spark to touch it in the right place.

One of the problems you must be aware of, and deal with, is the ever changing nature of electronic storage of written material. My first compoter was a Tandy-Radio Shack Color Computer with 16K Ram. The files were saved onto cassette tapes and 5.25 inch floppies. I have nothing that survives from that period. Which is OK, as I wasn’t writing at that time, except labor union newletters.

From there our family progressed to an Apple IIe, also with monster floppies. Next was an in-between Apple. All I remember is that the Woz signed it. Our youngest daughter inherited that one for a while. Then we moved on to a Mac Classic,which was, I think, the first with the 3.5 inch hard shell floppies. I still have boxes of those around and a chancy possibilty of reading them with a special plug-in USB drive made for that purpose. A lot of the files and disks are corrupted by time and cosmic radiation. It also takes a lot of time to search through the flops for any usable material. My life is busy enough that I don’t have a lot of time for doing that.

Today, I’m still working on a semi-fossilized dinosaur, a 1+ Meg Ram G-4 desktop Mac with a monitor the size of a turnip truck. Still, it does have two massive drives, a CD drive and a CD burner and all I do is type into a word-processor and play around some with still photos. The obvious point I’m trying to make is to protect your own resources, your past work. Even the stuff that you now think, stinks. Paper is an excellent choice, and it can be scanned.

All you may need is a single sentence to get you started again when the Big Dry hits. You have probably already written that sentence. You may want to change a word here and there, but the core is there, hidden away in your files. Go get ‘em, cowboys and cowgirls! Ride ‘em out of the chute! Give ‘em a chance to buck. Stay in the saddle ‘til they calm down, and put them back to work for you. Get along little doggies! Hi! Kay Yi.

(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace retired from the public schools after 28 years. His recently published book on religion lashes out at the comfortable ideas about God, organized religion, and the priesthood. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will interest everyone. This article may be freely reprinted so long as all copyright attributions, and the full content of this resource box are included. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com

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