Lost Ideas

The other day I was at work, hauling concrete or tile or… something, I don’t remember, and I was musing on something that clicked in my head. It crystallized into an idea about a great topic for a blog. Now, both my hands were full, and I was on the job, had no notebook on me, and didn’t want to pull out my phone and waste time we could be using to get the bathroom we were remodeling done, so I just kept thinking about the idea, building it in my head, and then figured I’d write it down when it matured more. 

Well, obviously since I’m not currently writing about that topic, you can tell that I didn’t write the idea down and it is now lost to the void. Maybe I’ll recreate the idea at some point in the future, or maybe it’s lost to time like so many other ideas throughout history. Either way, I know that it is most definitely not the first idea I’ve lost like that, and it will not be the last. 

As I sat here on my couch on this breezy and chilly Sunday morning, having moved in from the ‘catio’ (it’s a screened in porch where I grow my plants and yell at my cats for trying to eat them) and wracking my brains for long moments trying to dredge the original idea from my faulty memory and trying not to look at the clock to see the limited amount of time I have before needing to get to my next task, I started to muse on the other ideas that I’d lost to time over the course of creating the story. 

One major benefit I have is the excellent notes of my excellent note taker. However, if I were to open any one of the three Google Docs which house the notes (yes, there are three. Why? you ask? Because the first two got so long they would crash a computer trying to open them, so multiple docs are needed), it would take me days to read through all of them. The notes have become a great outline for the books and reference point for the story, but now and again, I realize how often we’ll go back and look at something and everyone will say, “Wow! I forgot about that.” 

This is a common problem for a lot of TTRPGs, even if you meet regularly, you don’t meet frequently. At the beginning, we met weekly on Wednesdays because… well… that’s when Adventurer’s League met at our local game store, and we just kind of kept the tradition alive. When weekly became too much (work, life, adulting, etc.) we moved to every other week, spreading out the game even further, making moments where we were in character fewer and further between. This was a healthy change, and allowed for me to go out on more nights, not stress about prep as much, and actually get things done that needed to be done (i.e. cooking, cleaning, and laundry… oh god the amount of laundry… Actually, I need to move something to the dryer). 

Okay, I’m back. 

This change did, however, create a lot more “Oh I forgot about that” moments. It doesn’t help that we’ve been playing this game for over seven years now, and that the books have only been written through the first arc, though only the first two have been published at this time. Honestly, most of the time I remember things that have been lost is when I’m going back through the notes with that fine tooth comb as I’m writing, which means as we’re playing arc four, I’m now rereading and relearning things that happened in arc two… from five years ago. 

One thing I love about going back in the notes is rediscovering the ideas and plot hooks that started out and maybe didn’t go anywhere. This is something that happens to all writers, where it can be on the small scale of a minor plot hole, or a more major moment like an entire plot line just up and vanishing like the colony of Roanoke (looking at you, Supernatural!) 

But what can be done about these lost ideas? Well, first and foremost, accept it. I know for a fact that there are plotholes in my game, which means there are going to be plotholes in my books. All I can do is patch the ones I can find and move on from there. Actually, during the editing process for On All Fronts, I realized that Luis had gotten a longsword from somewhere in the game, but it wasn’t noted in the notes, or I’d just handwaved it and let Luis pick one up from somewhere. It had been a pretty noticeable fact that he’d only had a shortsword up until then, then suddenly he had a longsword out of nowhere. In order to fix that, I had to go back in the story, find a good spot to slip it in, and rewrite points in the book to fix the flow. I had been complaining about my oversight to Nicole during one of our BG3 runs, and from then on, every time we looted something that had a longsword in it, we’d just laugh and go: “Oh look! A longsword for Luis!”

Other times, if you can’t accept the idea as lost, it may be a good idea to recycle your ideas. I would tell students when I was teaching writing that they needed to “kill their darlings,” but oftentimes, you could just put your darlings in cryogenic sleep. Between each arc, I would run a few one shots where we would get to explore each character on a more individual level, see them interact with NPCs who didn’t normally get recognition, and even just slip away from the game itself and write my own short story about the NPCs the players didn’t get to experience first hand. These one-shots became short stories too, and you can look forward to a collection of these coming out after the first arc is completed, but each of them comes from “lost ideas” or “ideas that don’t fit here.” Many come from my players saying “Hey, whatever happened with…” and I would say, “I don’t know, let’s find out!” The idea was lost until they brought it up, and rather than just saying how I’d forgotten all about it, I took it as an opportunity to explore something old that had just become new again. 

A lot of times, our lost ideas can feel shameful. We tell ourselves we should have written it down, we should have known better, or we should be more diligent and responsible. As an AuDHD person who has lost a lot of ideas over his life, I gotta tell ya, you’re going to lose a lot more than ideas, and you’re not going to be able to control what you lose or find. The best you can do is try to keep your ideas organized and available, but not get too upset if the idea is eventually lost. You don’t have as much control over your world as you would like, and you can’t always organize yourself out of things. As I look around my apartment, seeing the mess that needs to be cleaned up, I know that my time is valuable and limited. I need to clean, but I need to do a lot more too. So for now, I’ll do what I can, organize what I can, and hope I don’t lose anything of value. 

But hey, if it disappeared that easily, it wasn’t really worth all that much in the first place, was it?