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andrewduckerOne of the reasons I don't tend to worry about ideas is that I've tended to find that I have more than I know what to do with or will ever use in my lifetime. I have ideas every time my brain gets prodded by something, and then I forget them 3 minutes later unless something about them makes them stick for a bit longer. I used to worry that I was losing valuable ideas and that I'd run out, but there doesn't seem to be any danger of that.
I remember seeing an interview with Neil Gaiman where he said that it's incredibly common for people to come up to him and say "I have an idea for ...". He said that his internal response was that anyone could have ideas, the hard bit was sitting down and making it into a book/comic/film.
I have a similar memory problem, however, with journal entries. They occur at inopportune moments, like when I'm on a train, or at work. I suppose I ought to get a dictaphone or something similar, but the ideal option would be a laptop. Or not having to be at work/on a train at all, so I could just write.
I remember seeing an interview with Neil Gaiman where he said that it's incredibly common for people to come up to him and say "I have an idea for ...". He said that his internal response was that anyone could have ideas, the hard bit was sitting down and making it into a book/comic/film.
I have a similar memory problem, however, with journal entries. They occur at inopportune moments, like when I'm on a train, or at work. I suppose I ought to get a dictaphone or something similar, but the ideal option would be a laptop. Or not having to be at work/on a train at all, so I could just write.
Actually, no. That's not how you do it.
Date: 2002-05-08 12:20 pm (UTC)The dictaphone is of absolutely no use- retrieval time is way too high.
The laptop is better, but still very problematic. There's no easy way to emphasis some ideas, and demphasize others. You can keep related ideas together by using a markup, which is good. There's no way to easily include drawings. (In the future, this may be alleviated).
The best you can do right now is to use a combination of the following:
* A notebook (paper, ~120 pages) that you carry around with you. This is a chronological notebook, and a notebook for when you don't have your others with you.
* A series of notebooks, each devoted to individual topics. (paper, ~80 pages). Each notebook has the subject written down on it's side- the paper side, not the binding side. Stack them backwards for easy retrieval. These notebooks are dedicated to notes on a particular subject. Examples from my collection: Games, Society, MetaThought, Visual, Electronics, Electronics 2, Physics, Bus Architecture, Software, Unicorn, PostGreSQL/Apache, FUP. There are also a handful of notebooks (paper, ~120 pages) where I organize notes for my future books on the topics. Ex: "Visual Book", a notebook on visual communication.
* A file (http://taoriver.net/~lion/weird.html) for quick notes on the computer. Quickly falling out of use.
Take care,
Lion Kimbro