Further to Hugo Lindgren’s provocative article in The New York Times, ‘Be Wrong as Fast as You Write’ it got me thinking about writing, and ideas and how one decides which ideas need to be written – or which ideas are actually any good and deserve to go further.
I have ideas aplenty. I get inspiration for stories in the most unlikely of events, and I write them down in my notebook. When I start a new notebook, I review the ideas, and very often transfer them over but I know that most of these stories will go unwritten. That’s not because they are bad ideas, but I might decide that they just don’t have enough story in them to make anything of, or more likely, that I’m just working on something else. The truth is you can only truly tell whether an ideas good, when you take it beyond the idea stage and write it, all of it, then read it back. If you still like it, give it to someone else to read and ask them (you may have to ask a few people to get a balanced view).
However, whenever, or whatever you do with the story you can only really make a judgment on it when its either worked or hasn’t. Until then, its just an idea in a box of unfulfilled ideas…
