10 Ways I Organise to Bring my Ideas to Life
It’s not easy to juggle ideas when you are a creator with so many of them. I hope there is something in this blog to help your organisation and completion of projects.
I have so many ideas, I’m unlikely to be able to complete them in my lifetime. I remember exactly when I started exploring my creative self. It was 1998 and I had just left home and travelled across the world. I bought a notebook and a sketchpad and started writing and drawing. Not only was this therapeutic, I started to get ideas. It’s in those early books that my voice started to emerge. I started to heal, and more importantly, I started to find me.
My first big creative idea for a novel was about the Turkish harems and the women in them. It’s still a novel idea in my ideas folder, but I don’t think I am the woman I need to be to write that just yet…stay tuned.
“...becoming the woman I need to be to write some of these projects might take some more personal development and life experience.”
I love Elizabeth Gilbert’s idea of stories floating around us and I truly believe ideas have a life of their own. They drift around until they find an enthusiastic host. And my goodness, I have many! So, I thought I’d take the time to write about my creativity process and how I’ve been so productive during 2023.
Ideas Notebooks: keep ideas in many places (journal/notebook/ sketchbook/notes and screenshots on the phone). Some of these ideas are brilliant, some are fragments of ideas that sometimes align with other ideas (see step 2). I’ve found holding my ideas on my computer is not for me - especially since the great computer crash of 2023! I keep screenshots here I guess - and attach them to folders of the story ideas once they’ve got something substantial to work with, but generally, I like my paper-based system.
Notes Transfer: Once or twice a year, I transfer the notes in the books into an ideas folder. In this case a physical binder with plastic sleeves. Sometimes I find ideas that can go together and my plastic sleeves are filled with scraps of paper with seemingly random ideas that intuitively I know go together. When they get to be a big enough idea I put them into step 3.
Project book: I have a spiral-bound lined book and on the top of every page, I have the heading of one of my projects - they start broad e.g. podcast, but eventually become more specific e.g. episode 3. This raggedy book goes in my backpack to go with me, especially when I go to the library and I can add notes to each of my ideas. To give a very specific example, one page has ravens/crows and random notes and ideas I have around them, including research. I have no idea where this idea will take me, but I know it’s important for something that I’m not sure is fully formed yet. It could be the chapter or character of a book, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, for now, it’s an interest.
Multi-year planning: after all, my harem story has been hanging around for 25 years, if I want to do it, I need to schedule it! Multi-year planning/scheduling has been a game-changer for my creative brain. It gives me specific projects to aim for and complete. This doesn’t mean I don’t allow space for my creativity to follow a thread. One unexpected project that came up in 2023 for me was the first in my Little Known Fairy Tales Series. It was completely unexpected, but a wonderful diversion that has been opened up with the ‘yes’ I spoke about last blog.
Annual scheduling: Based on the multi-year planning, I specify some annual goals. And, as we are coming to the end of the year, it’s a perfect time to set some targets for the new swing around the sun. There are projects that I want to be completed in 2024. And, I have so many unfinished projects that I think I’ll be finishing off for a few more years yet. But how do I decide? I follow my heart. As I said above, becoming the person I need to be to write some of these projects might take some more personal development and life experience.
Planning by the new moon: Every new moon, I sit down and celebrate what I’ve achieved in the last moon cycle and set some new goals for the next moon. I set one large (must-do) goal and then 5-6 smaller ones - it could be anything from ‘write two chapters of X manuscript’ to purchasing ISBNs! Often I won’t always hit my goals that month, so I roll it into the next, but because I can see how long I’ve wanted to do it, it gets me into the mindset for finishing it.
Weekly targets: On Sunday night, I make a list of the ‘must do’ and ‘be nice if’ things I’d like to achieve (towards larger goals). As the week progresses, I cross off things and feel a real sense of accomplishment when I can cross them off. My list is affixed to the front of my Project Book so it’s easily available. Sometimes they roll over to the next week, but again, I can see how long it’s been on my list and it is internal motivation to cross it off!
Daily: I don’t necessarily plan anything specific on my days off from my waged job or when I can squeeze in time to do things, however, as long as I’m making progress to crossing those things off my list, I feel a sense of accomplishment.
Self-rewards: I have been rewarding myself with chocolate when I complete something, but I realised a more valuable reward is to go to the beach. Beach is medicine. The more I complete, the more I can surrender to the crystal blue salt water of my city - that’s a reward I can really get behind.
Appreciation: I appreciate every idea that comes to me, I welcome it like a friend. If it’s something I feel that might suit someone else, I send it on its way. This may be a weird thing to say, but it feels like a spiritual process of gathering ideas. Characters and concepts sit around me like the juggling balls in the picture but I joyfully welcome them. Some of the ideas have been hanging around for decades, others are new and shiny but it is my intention to bring all of them to life.
It has taken me years to get to this point of creative organisation, and to be honest, it wasn’t until I took this path seriously that I found what worked for me. Everyone’s process is different. I am still working between Canva, Word and Scrivener for completion of the books and a host of other platforms for everything else. But at last, I finally feel like my ideas have a place in the queue and eventually, I’ll get to them.
