I gave up on writing things down long ago. It seems to work so well for other people, but I either misjudge what makes an idea interesting, or else misplace the paper in a pile of other papers. Or I’ll type things in a txt file, only to have it become a clearinghouse for random paste/clipboard stuff of all sorts. As a solution, I tend to do research constantly. I talk to myself. If there is an idea, I keep it alive in my thought life, research, and self-talk until I can home it.
Creatively, I am an obsessive–not pathologically obsessive, just fixated. Every large creative project that I’ve undertaken begins as a sort of haunting. There is initially a sentence or image that will not go away, but soon I am finding things to stick to it or dangle from it. It is a creative problem to solve: how to realize this thing. I am never looking at my idea space; it is looking at me, or it surrounds me, or else it is over my shoulder.
In terms of finished product, I am talking about poetry, but I am working on an Inform 7 project now. So far as these processes go, it is so far working the same way.
They can be big or small - usually an idea for a whole game is hard to forget, but if I’m driving and suddenly thing “this should happen!” I don’t have to write it down, because if it’s that good, I’ll remember it.
What about turns of phrase? Sometimes a particular combination of words might seem to have a lot of potential. I have to write them down straight away, because they don’t hang around long otherwise.
My idea space is jumbled and cluttered with each idea clammering for dominance. Unfortunately, the adventure ideas have to fight with other thoughts related to work, health and home maintenance.
If I have a good idea, I have to write it down so that (a) I don’t forget it, and (b) I don’t keep regurgitating the same idea. I used to record lots of ideas back in the 1980s and it’s a good thing that I did. I recently came across all those old ideas in a dusty manila folder. Some of those ideas were great, but I’d forgotten all about them. I actually used two of the puzzle ideas as inspiration for two of the puzzles in ‘Captain Cutter’s Treasure’. If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have been able to think up new puzzles, then design, code and test the game in only three weeks.
I used to be a big cheerleader of writing journals. I still keep one handy, but a few years ago I developed a project using only my phone’s notes app (which synchronizes with the same app on my writing computer).
It was a revelation! It worked far better than I expected. On the bus, or even waking up in the middle of the night with an idea, it was easy to reach for my phone and tap it in.
Now my journal is more for long-term thinking or scratching out vague ideas with a pen. My phone notebook is something I tend to use once the project is developing steam or underway.
I have a poor visual imagination (not none at all, but not much), so this is just a metaphor rather than how I conceptualize it typically, but it’s basically a set of unlabeled, not organized drawers that I shove things into thinking I will definitely know where they are when I need or want them later, and then several months on I’m like “where was that thing?” and I have no idea which drawer I put it in. But while going through the drawers I might find something else I forgot was in there and just go with that instead!
This is basically how my brain works all the time for everything (ADHD, wooo) and I usually deal with it by obsessively organizing things externally (physically or with lists and spreadsheets and whatnot), but I’ve never managed to maintain an ideas journal or document for writing, for some reason. I just can’t seem to get the habit to stick.
I do have a visual imagination, but it’s something I have to consciously switch on. Reading a book is mostly raw words, concepts, ideas entering my mind, until I come across a passage where I say to myself “wait a minute, this probably looks really cool…” This happened all the time when I was reading Gormenghast.
So I too have no visual representation of a mental idea space. I have narratives that split and come together, loose sentences, vaguely filled in logical cause-effect frameworks. Of course, it doesn’t help that all of our language to talk about abstract stuff like this is taken from spatial visualization.
Actually, I would call much of my thought-process pre-explicit. There are not even words or sentences but the awareness/feeling/knowledge of the concept that could be brought into words. These form the basic building blocks of my mental life until it’s necessary to compress my ideas in a communicable way. A lot of nuances and colour-tints get lost in this process, but it is clearer and crystallized.
One of my very favorite short stories by the Finnish YA writer, Tove Jansson is “The Spring Tune,” which is about this exactly. It’s read gorgeously here, if you want to listen to it.
A lot of bats flying around banging into the walls.
Bats on meth.
Seriously, though, like Drew I’m generally haunted by things that I need to finish. Images from them, dialogue, faces, moments will float up to my consciousness. I’ll daydream the world, or muddle with the thing I’m working on or whatever. If it’s not important to me currently, I’ll ignore it although these days with ADD meds I tend not to be bothered by interruptions of other things as much, mentally.
When the meds wear off it’s bats again. I like bats, though. Particularly fruit bats.
You know, I don’t know if I can answer the question. I just know a few things I do to keep it in relatively good (I hope) shape.
I’d like to second this. I don’t use it as much as I’d like, but it’s handy to be able to speak into a phone and have the notes for later.
I like having a weekly writing file on my computer, because it’s relatively easy to pull up, and I’ve come to realize it’s more satisfying to write in it instead of browsing the internet. I have a python program that graphs hourly progress/size of my writing file. The size itself isn’t important as much as just saying, okay, I don’t want a ton of red dots in a row.
Have you read Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch? Your process sounds an awful lot like his!
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” - David Lynch
With parser games I have a very clear visual picture of the territory my games are set in which becomes more concrete as the game progresses towards completion. It’s a bit like a lucid dream in that the harder I look, the more detail I can see. I can mentally walk through those landscapes long after the games have been released in much the same way that I can revisit places I’ve been to in real life.
Characters work similarly in that I know them better and better as the work progresses and by the end I know far more about them than it’s possible to encompass in the game itself. I know exactly how they would react in any given situation and after a while they pretty much write themselves. One or two of my characters have turned up in my dreams.
Creating a puzzle is similar to solving a puzzle, and sometimes it can take me forever to come up with a solution. The release of one game was delayed by a whole year while I waited for a satisfying way of gating a particular object to present itself. When the idea did arrive, it used several pre-existing objects and fitted into the game perfectly. These ideas seem to come out of nowhere, usually first thing in the morning after a good sleep, but I’m pretty sure our subconscious minds are working on the problem continually in the background and it only seems like magic. Lance Campbell told me he likes to thank his subconscious every time this happens, and I shall remember to do this in future. It seems only right.
