Writing–Is This Worth Writing?

I’ve got two potential ideas for this year’s NaNoWriMo. I’m actually delighted that I’m getting any ideas so early considering the last couple of years I’ve waited until the last minute before coming up with something. I’ve also got an idea for a new novella (unless it decides to keep growing). I’m rather excited by the sudden influx of creativity I’ve got going on here.

However, I’m faced with the usual problem whenever I get any idea: is this worth writing?

I admit that I get a lot of ideas, notions, scraps of inspiration, and those end up getting jotted down in my idea notebook because most of the time, as good as they seem, there’s not much to them. At least not yet. So I save them for later.

There are times, like recently, that the ideas I get are so strong that they won’t leave my head and I find myself having a whole lot to jot down in my notebook. I keep coming back to those ideas because there’s something there that arouses my interest and keeps me wondering how it could all work out.

Those ideas, the ones that seem to have so much promise, are the ones that I judge the harshest. And I’m not always a very good judge. Sometimes I get caught up in the excitement and I start writing an idea that maybe isn’t ready to be written, or shouldn’t be written at all. After a few days, maybe a week, I realize it. The whole thing grinds to a halt and I’m left disappointed.

It happened recently. I had this great idea and I started to sketch it out. And while I was still sketching it, I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to start writing the beginning of it. Sure enough, had I put in the due diligence of sketching, I might have realized that my enthusiasm would be short-lived and the idea would have been better left to settle in the sketch stage instead of being rushed into production.

That’s the kind of dance I’m doing now with these three new ideas. I’m doing a lot of thinking and sketching. The two potential novel ideas will need some research, one more than the other. But more importantly, is there enough story there that’s worth writing? I don’t want to be caught short during NaNo. One of the novel ideas I can tell has a problem with having enough story. Right now I’ve only got one main thread and that’s not going to be enough to go the distance with if I want to do it for NaNo. The other one already has a few threads to work with the main thread, so I consider it to have a little more potential. Except the way I want to do it is different than anything I’ve ever done before and it might not be a good idea to do it that way.

The novella is healthy as a horse, as near as I can tell. The only question I’ve got with it is will I be able to write it the way that I want to and the way that I see it in my head.

But that’s another post for another day.