I took a break from writing this weekend to take a trip — no computer, no internet! — with my in-laws who are here visiting for two weeks. Whenever I slow down on my writing, it seems as if my brain goes into overdrive, coming up with a multitude of new ideas, plot suggestions, interesting character names for me to work on. I just jot them down quickly. I never seem to have a shortage of (what I consider) interesting story ideas. Some of them end up being not so interesting once I begin working on them but that’s how it goes…
What about you? Are your files full of more story ideas than you’ll ever be able to finish in a lifetime or do you have to search for each little speck of flour that you bake into a wonderful story?
Kristy Dempsey 
I’m the same way, Kristy. I have many ideas I’d like to find time to write.
In the past, I could never finish a novel because I’d always want to write the next idea. In the last five years, I’ve learned to resist that urge and finish a book. I’ve now completed two and am working on a third. Good accomplishment for me, considering the “pull” I’m always feeling.
Oh, resisting the urge…That’s possible? 🙂
I could write forever on the stuff from my idea files–the thing is, I don’t always have the passion for those ideas after time has passed, even if I still think they are decent.
I wonder if passion is necessary? Does it sometimes boil down to toughing it out and writing it and then in the process we re-develop the passion?
Perhaps one must force oneself to tough it out when there are no other ideas, but if there is passion for other projects, why dig into the file at all?
Somewhere in between the two. I don’t have to hunt for specks, but on the other hand, I don’t have more novel ideas than I have time for. Deo volente.
I have way too many ideas that I don’t know what they are yet. 🙂
After I wrote my first novel, I had no ideas for a bout 6 weeks…but since I finished my first YA (my second book), the ideas come hard and fast…right now I have about three percolating — once I start on one of those, I know others will come.
When it rains, it pours!
I’m a one-novel-at-a-time kind of woman and right now I have way too many ideas to fit into the WIP I’m working on now. But beyond this one? I have no idea what I’m going to write. It’s a desert out there.
All those ideas will make it into some book eventually, no?