It’s true what I’ve said: If you love to write, you will make time to do it. It’s just that, you’re busy, and the truth is also that I am too. Let’s see–there’s been holidays, tonsillectomies (2 kids at once), Christmas vacation, a holiday retreat during Thanksgiving. Thus, my absence from blogging for the last few months. If you’ll see fit to see past this small transgression, though, we’ll move on to the meat of my current post…
At the end of my last post, I promised to write about storage for your creative ideas. If you’ve worked at maximizing your mind-body health, your creative brain should be churning out ideas faster than you can say ‘Epiphany’. So what do you do with all of this information? You don’t want to lose any of it.
How many times have you had a dream early in the morning, you’ve awakened remembering a good portion of it, but you didn’t write the images and thoughts down as your brain recalled them for you? How much of that dream do you remember now? You might remember emotions, or there might be vague details that you can grasp, but unless your dream recurs, there’s only a tiny chance that you’ll recover the information, ever. What if you had written the details down, though? They’d still be there, right?
My most fluid and intelligent ideas strike me when I’m first waking up or while I’m contemplating sleep, thus the most efficient means of storing my ideas is to keep my notebook computer on my nightstand. The same could be accomplished by keeping journal pages or a diary at my bedside (if I didn’t write a whole lot slower than I type.) The point is: write those ideas down.
Of course, there are times when you can’t write your ideas down–like when you’re driving, or sitting in a staff meeting, or bathing your toddler. Thank goodness we live in a mobile society, because there are many inexpensive and low-tech solutions for idea storage, even when you can’t write them down. Several of today’s cell phone models are capable of storing verbal memos. Or, you could subscribe to a voicemail transcription service that types out your voice files and emails them to you. Even easier is a tiny, portable digital voice recorder. Many models can be kept on your keychain and can be easily plugged into a USB port to upload ideas to your computer when the device is full. (The trick is, and you wouldn’t laugh if you had four children conspiring against you, as I do–not to lose said device, ideas and all.)
If all else fails, most ideas will notch out a permanent place in your brain if they are repeated six times. I bet you always wondered why annoying commercials blared their phone number six times during the ad–scientific evidence supports retention of a number or fact that is repeated. If your epiphany has no tangible place to land, repeat it (to yourself–no sense alerting the looney bin) at least three to six times, and chances are that you’ll glom onto it long enough to get home and write it down.
Lastly, oh creative brother or sister, please, please, always have a back-up plan. To assure that your computer doesn’t lock up and swallow all of your information at some tragically inconvenient time, look into a secure, online data back-up service (such as Dell’s) that can remotely store your work. Or you can do like I do and back-up the important stuff on a memory stick on a regular basis and toss it into the fire safe.
I look forward to posting more throughout the New Year as we all work on becoming our best creative selves despite, or perhaps because of, the busy lives that we lead. Until then, adieu, and Happy New Year.
Where Has The Time Gone? Blog 