Writing daily is fun. It's a chance for me to sort through my thoughts and bring to the surface things floating on top of my "pool of thoughts" that I hadn't consciously acknowledged. Much of what I talk about is "writing itself", as that's what I'm doing right in the moment. But sometimes it also provides an excuse for me to look into interesting stuff, like whether "fishes" is a proper word or not, or to propose the silly evolutionary question of whether our technological progress actually comes from our love of tasty food.
I actually have a small notebook full of ideas I want to talk about, but somehow, half the time, I don't get around to writing about them. The reason is that, for most of those ideas, I feel like "I'm not good enough," and attempting to write about them is a waste of "a good idea." Silly me.
...
Actually, as I write this, I just remembered a quote I read some time ago that had to do with exactly this problem. It took a bit of digging, but here it is: it's from a book called "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard:
"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."
...
(Well, now I feel like I should drop everything and jump into one of my ideas 😅)
I don't know why I forgot this quote. It's so "emphatic" and really hits the heart of what I was talking about. "Trust the process". Funny how the subconscious drags up things at the appropriate time. I should print this out and tape it to my desk somewhere.
Maybe this offers a chance for some reframing? Let's get into it...
- I'm relating to all this from a "scarcity mindset," which makes me "hoard" stuff.
- The feeling of "not wanting to use up a good idea" definitely comes from a sense that such "good ideas" are scarce; there's a fear that "the well is finite," and the more we use it, the more it dries up.
- This is silly, though, as I know firsthand that the less I worry about the process, the better it flows.
- I also know that ideas are cheap, and what really matters is the execution.
- And even if the execution is somehow botched, the end result still ends up upon the compost heap, which will fertilize the ground for new ideas to follow.
So that's the reframing I'm looking for. The "bad" is still useful, and the "well" never dries. It's actually the other way around: the more we use it, the sweeter the water.
I did some brief research online about this problem, and it seems to be extremely common. A good post I found is this one by Kyle Massa, where he makes some excellent points I didn't consider here. I suggest you read it; it's a pretty short one. An idea that especially stood out to me was:
- Hoarded ideas become stale. I can so see this in my own practice. As soon as I get an idea I'm excited about it, but then that excitement fades slowly, and it's hard to recover once lost.
I want to close with a quote also from the above post:
Hoarding food in preparation of the impending zombie apocalypse makes sense. Good eats are going to get scarce once the zombies shamble into town (unless of course, you are a zombie yourself). By its very nature, the act of hoarding implies scarcity. But unlike food, ideas are completely renewable resources. When we hoard them, we’re forgetting that fact.
We’re writers, right? We make stuff up for fun or work (or both), then we pour our imaginations onto the page. Just because we haven’t thought of the next idea yet doesn’t mean we never will. The idea will present itself to us when it’s ready. So let’s not get into this scarcity mindset.
Thoughts:
- Why are ravioli plates so small? The person who came up with the standard serving size definitely didn't consider whether the ones eating them would be full afterward or not.