Inspiration (and a plea to the scientific community)

A short entry today, friends, but I remembered to update today, so I'm happy about that.

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend on the nature of inspiration. She, also a writer, explained that she gets ideas for characters all the time, but suffers from a dearth of plots. I, on the other hand, get ideas for...if not "plots" exactly, then story seeds. They can be triggered by anything. The other day I was driving to work in the early morning and was thinking about how empty the world was, especially since the area I was driving through at the exact moment in time was bordered on one side by fields and woods. "What if," I imagined, "someone was driving in a similar situation but in a more remote area, and then some great big beastie ran out in front of them and into the woods?"

Would the person stop? Would they crash? What if they made it to work safely, but couldn't help wonder about whatever it was that they saw? What if they got to the end of the day and stopped at that spot on their way home? What if they saw something to indicate that they weren't imagining it, something that made it clear the beastie wasn't normal? Etc.

That's just how my brain works. I get ideas all the time. Unfortunately, I do not get time all the time. I have as much per day as everybody else, and there's no way that I can create during all of it. I can't even focus hard enough to make the best use out of my free time. And that really sucks, because I have so many awesome ideas, but I can't work on all of them simultaneously or I'd make such little progression in each one that it'd take forever to get any individual one of them finished. So that means I have to go the opposite way and shelve them for later, make a list of projects I'm interested in, pursue each one on the list until the item in question is complete, and then move on.

But when I get an idea I'm really excited about I can create a lot of content in a short period of time. That level of excitement doesn't last for very long. The question then becomes: "Is it more efficient to take breaks from a current project to take advantage of a new one if doing so will delay completion of the current project?"

I'm not sure I have an answer, either. I tend to do what I've just described, although I haven't missed a structured deadline yet. Still, how much more work could I get done if I didn't have to sleep?

Scientists! Get working on that. Papa's got some worlds to write.