Why You Shouldn't Trash Old Ideas

My proofreading for «Aleks meets Inga» is going much slower than I'd originally planned on, but it's the holidays… among other things. Anyway, This week, I'd like to talk about why you shouldn't throw away your old ideas. I know some people do, and that's your prerogative, I guess, but I think keeping them around is better in the long run, even if you don't use them.

Firstly, I think that, whether or not you're aware of it, you use your old ideas all of the time, maybe not in their original capacity, but you're pulling from them, nonetheless. Remember a few posts ago when I mentioned the trail of how Aleks came to be the pain that we all know and barely (if any) tolerate? Yeah… kinda going back a few steps with him, back when he was still Seth, and the Gemsona? You'll get to meet him in time… at least chunks of the personality. I don't know exactly when the story's set, but it's set in the same time period that most of my long-lost work was set in (think dial-up, grunge, converses, floppy disks, and when you had to actually walk up to someone before you could confess your undying love to them.) Unfortunately, I don't really have a good way of writing it on period-correct hardware… some things in my collection are proving harder to… deal with, at the moment.

Secondly, or more an extension of my first point, you can always build off of ideas, whether it be your own or someone else's, though I'd recommend some caution in that. Still, I don't think that getting rid of something, just because it's not the picture child you're wanting it to be, is a good way to go. If it's something that you want to do, even if you trash it, believe me, it will come back. Even if you don't think the two are related in any way, you can still look and see "Oh, this is what started xyz." and, when you look back down the road, you might even realize that what you didn't like was what you wanted. It's a little backwards, I know, but in the show Bojack Horseman, if you watch the episodes where Dianne Nguyen is trying to write a book of her memoirs, you'll see that, while she doesn't want to write Ivy Tran, that's how (I believe) she ended up successful. If I'm wrong on that one, you'll have to forgive me, it's been a while since I've watched the show in any capacity, not to mention I've slept since then. Still, though, you can see how, in the end, her ideas manifested themselves in a way that everyone (and eventually herself) came to like and enjoy by way of her Ivy Tran series.

Thirdly, and I think this may be my last point today, is to simply give your ideas life and control of themselves. It sounds a bit on the crazy side when I say it out loud, but hear me out on it: this actually does work. Whatever the idea is, a character, story, anything, it can grow into something entirely new. I'm not saying to find something good and latch onto it so much as I'm saying to explore the different paths it could possibly take and the different shapes it could take on. Penelope Turner, a yet-unseen character of mine, is somewhat of an example of this: her character is basically Aleks (when he was called Sasha the first time around), but if he were a girl that was able to convince herself that she had a strong connection to East Asia, somehow. To each their own, I say, but the premise of the two characters is the exact same: "Assholes to the world, brilliant to a close few." It's not the most elegant, and I can't say for certain if Penelope will go anywhere or if Seth will be more than a one-and-done story, but by giving them life and a path that they can grow on as themselves, it's kind of like a way to explore and encourage more open ways of thinking, if you will.

Anyway, that about sums it up for this one. Have fun and never throw an idea out!