I can end up feeling stalked by my ideas. They're always percolating up from the depths and there are far too many of them. I feel compelled to write them down because I don't want to lose them, but sometimes it's almost non-stop ideas, 24/7, and then it becomes a burden. I'm always having to interrupt myself to write down a new concept. Sometimes I wish my ideas would go away -- not forever, but for a while. (Yes, I realize this is manic behavior. I am indeed manic. I love it!)
An idea is only truly fresh when it first comes to you. There is an actual bloom on a fresh idea. It's sticky, with all sorts of ancillary ideas attached to it. And when you fully unfold an idea, it can be huge. Now, it's never ideal to go back to an idea. You want to grab a new idea and rush to the keyboard with it -- you want to use it. And that's great as far as it goes. But it's not always time for an idea, especially when you're in the middle of writing another book. (Which is why every writer needs lots of notebooks.)
Although I fear losing my ideas, there's a certain kind that I just push back into my head, unexamined. It's not their time, you see. I also do this because I don't want to examine an idea closely and cause its probability wave to collapse. So I just shove it back into the depths, still fresh and filled with unplumbed promise. It's tricky to engineer this without losing the idea entirely, but it's possible and at times, necessary.
For instance, I don't want to have ideas right now about the third book of The Worlds. It's not time for those ideas. Although I've written pages and pages of notes for the third book, I don't want to look at anything too closely. I want to forestall the moment when my brain charges headlong into the story. So far I've been able to stem the tide of ideas for book 3. They're still safe inside my brain and they'll be fresh when I haul them out for the big unfolding. (Plus I did scribble this and that down, just in case.)
This reminds me of a friend from my college days. His name was Richard and he did a very odd thing. If, for instance, I asked him for the telephone number of that guy we met last night, a number neither of us had written down at the time, Richard would be able to pull it out of his memory and tell me. But dog forbid I didn't write it down, because if I asked him an hour later for the number, he'd say, "Sorry. That was my only copy and I gave it to you." And that was that. He was never able to remember the information again.
I think this has to do with short-term memory, the mind's scratch pad for information that we need in our daily life -- like our address and phone number and those handy key combinations we use at the computer. Eventually, if we don't use a bit of information that resides in short-term memory, the brain pushes it off the local scratch pad. Richard's brain was just very efficient about this process. When it delivered information that it thought it would no longer need, it tossed it in the garbage. (You also have to wonder if his brain performed a "Move" operation instead of a "Copy". It's fun to consider these things.)
I point this out to show that our brains handle ideas in their own odd ways, and we have to respect this and work within our capabilities. As far as me shoving book ideas back down into my brain, I think the truth is that I don't want my ideas to enter short-term memory because they'll get get dusty and lose their luster there. Plus, they might get shoveled off to a distant corner of my brain when I'm not looking, and who knows if I'll be able to find them again. Richard couldn't.
This has been a report from my brain. Please feel free to report from yours.
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