Thursday, February 08, 2007

Ideas For Writing


Dear Dead Beat,


I keep a notebook hand at all times for jotting down my ideas. Very often these come to me while lying in bed at night. I have to get up and turn on the light to write them down. My husband is not so pleased about this, but I am afraid of losing my ideas if I leave them until the morning.


Anonymous



Dear Anonymous,


Which would you rather: lose your ideas or lose your husband? Okay, okay, it was a rhetorical question.


You know, Dead Beat believes that you go to bed to rest and sleep. That is a necessary part of the writing life too. Jumping in and out of bed writing down ideas harms this part of the writing process. Ideas, quite frankly, are a dime a dozen. Once you get used to creating them you will have more than you can ever write about.


Good husbands don't come so easily.

3 comments:

trevor said...

I suggest investing in some sort of data input device with keys that are backlit. The light from a PDA, for example, shouldn't disturb your husband, and later you can sync the data to your laptop so re-inputting it is unnecessary. I use a smartphone (Sidekick II) and never wake my wife.

Anonymous said...

My laptop is wireless so that if the inspiration to write hits me in the middle of the night,I can quickly get up, move to another room and write. That way I never wake my husband.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Deadbeat. Ideas are a dime a dozen. However, getting into the routine of actually sitting down and working with those ideas is hard, bloody hard. What did Einstein say? Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration...

Anon

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