Better late than never with the blog.
No really, my mind was a blank last night as to what to write about. Then it hit me! Or was it my wife Sue throwing something at my head again? Either way I had a subject, The Morgue Pile!
Being a writer means you need to be a wellspring of never-ending ideas. However some ideas don’t get to see the light of day. Sometimes they don’t work out for either because of no money to launch them or they just downright suck. It’s ok to admit that an idea sucks. It keeps us from getting a big head.
Artists have what is called a morgue pile of pictures they use for reference when they draw. Writers have something like that. However instead of pictures, we have old story ideas that never see the light of day. We go to this pile and pick off the dead bodies for chunks of meat that we can reuse in newer stories. A character here, a setting there, and maybe sweet plotline we can use as a tasty desert.
Valendor started off as an old game world. I recycled it into a great setting. Gearz was going to be a bounty hunter in a space western; now she’s a cop in a world over run with pirates. Delphi, soon to appear in DarkBrain’s Mirror Mirror, was going to be a lawyer for a group of ancient gods who needed to hire a champion. See never waste what you can reuse.
A morgue pile can be used as a wellspring of new ideas. Never throw anything out – horde as many ideas as you can, you never know when they may come in handy. Carry around a small notebook and pen to write things down. The first thing I tell new writers is to write whenever you can. It might look silly having to carry around a Valtron wire bound notebook, but I’ve been able to plot out an entire run of books while sitting at a slow show, pick out a slice of dialogue from a passerby, or even hit on a new idea for a book that might be added to the morgue at a later date.
One other practice I’ve gotten into is sleeping on the idea. My train of thought is if you come up with an idea, sleep on it. If it survives until the next morning then it might have some merit. This blog entry is a shining example of that practice.
There is my two cents for this blog entry. I hope I have enlightened you as to what is going on in the mind of the writer and who knows, maybe I’ll come back to this blog entry to dig a chunk of meat off of it to use at a later time.
I’ve ran off at the mouth long enough. Next blog entry I will blog about the Steampunk meet up Sue and I went to.
Have fun you little pirates!