In a post on Writers in the Storm, Joseph Lallo says writers should put every scrap of writing they create to good use. “If no idea is wasted, you’ll be amazed how much your creative output increases,” Lallo says.
Lallo calls his method the Bad Idea Exercise:
- Create a file for your idea clippings. “This can be one folder for everything, one per series, or even one per title,” Lallo says. “The important thing is that it is quickly accessible.” The file will be helpful during brainstorming, because every idea you don’t use is waiting for the next time. Lallo also suggests keeping the file handy during the revision process. When you cut something, keep it in your folder. “It won’t take long to start to collect a healthy pile of dislodged lines and scenes,” he says. “Now you just need to wait until the right moment to make something of them.”
- Use your ideas. When you finish one project, dive into your file for some inspiration. Some ideas that were too thin for a novel-length project might work for a short story. Ideas that don’t fit the tone of one project might be perfect for the next. Characters or scenes that you cut from a novel can be refashioned or expanded as a supporting side story you can give away as a freebie. “Scenes built from the bad ideas clipped out of a story still have the DNA of that story,” Lallo says. “This makes them prime fodder for marketing material.”
- Do the work. “None of this is worth doing if it fails to produce a story people want to read,” Lallo writes. “As traced out in the earlier examples, the secret to filling out a story fragment to a full story is asking the questions a reader would ask and making sure either the answer is available or the mystery is enticing.”
