A writer’s ideas: not scarce, but fleeting
Posted on March 14, 2008 in Endless Navel-Gazing by DM
Last week I quoted Virginia Woolf’s statement about women writers. I did so with only the most cursory of Google look-ups to get the quote correct, and I confess I had not read the entire essay from which the quotation was taken. My curiosity got the better of me, though, and I did finally go and look up the full text of “A Room of One’s Own.” And found this marvelous little analogy, not about writing, but about those nagging little ideas that come to you but get away before you can fully develop them:
“Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.”
I especially love how Woolf compares her seemingly insignificant thought to being “the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water…” beautiful! Of course, Virginia’s “insignificant thought” became the basis for her entire lecture on the “unsolved problems” of women and fiction.
In my world, I liken this to the process of collecting ideas for my writing. Ideas for stories, articles, bits of dialog, scenic descriptions… all the odds and ends I’d like to keep track of. Probably a thousand of them dart through my mind each day, but I rarely make time to lay them out in the grass – to use Woolf’s analogy – for real study. I do take one precaution, however, so they never completely slip away from me: I write them down, either in a notebook or on any slip of paper I can grab, then I drop them into a file for future browsing. It’s good mental exercise to go back and look through my notes once in awhile to see how many of these bring back the full original thought… and how many of them get “developed” in a direction completely different from the one originally intended.
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I absolutely loved the quote you used! I also return some of my ’small fry’ ideas into the water, allowing them to grow. And, like you, that means writing ideas down in a notebook. I write only one idea per page … and I’ll develop them based on the time I have available. Sometimes this means the ideas are nothing more than a single line of text. Perhaps not even a complete sentence. I find this to be a great technique for developing blog entries: I now have about 25 different guppie concepts somewhere between original thought and final proofread!
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