Using those Extra CPU Cycles

There are several points throughout a typical week for me where I'll have some mental downtime - times when I can run on autopilot physically, and let my mind drift. These could be times when I'm driving into work, mowing the lawn, doing the laundry - all situations where I don't need my full mental powers to complete the task at hand. The leftover brain cells tend to act like a SETI@Home screensaver, and churn through whatever has been on my mind that week.

Lately, the extra CPU cycles have been spent working out various pieces of this novel. Sometimes it's the backstory for a particular character; other times it's some artifact of the world; still others it's a plot twist that I'd like to incorporate.

All of these thoughts eventually end up in the "loosely organized document of my thoughts and wishes" that I mentioned in my last post. This document started as a single paragraph that described a dream I had which forms the central struggle of the story. I kept adding bits and pieces to it until it finally achieved the state of "utterly disorganized mess", or UDM. I'd like to think that the UDM stage was an accomplishment rather than a roadblock: I finally had put enough material together that I felt the need to organize it. I say "enough" because this will have been the seventh story that I've tried to start, and the previous six didn't go very far after the initial idea was written down.

Up until this point I had been dating the notes and thoughts that I came up with. I have continued to maintain that list but have started another one - one that breaks the story up into chapters. I've been organizing the thoughts from the chronological list into the chapter list, trying to see how the various pieces should fit together. In the course of that process, I think I've discovered the need for a third, intermediary list: a description of the various story threads that need to be woven together to form the overall story. This will be a topic for a later post.

So far this system has given me the flexibility to jot down anything that comes to mind, without the pressure of fitting it into the story right away. Once I have the thoughts down I can start to see patterns form, and where to fit each point into the story starts to make more sense. Sometimes the points play off of each other - pieces that I've thought of weeks apart click together in an unusual way. If I had forced myself to find a place for it to fit as soon as I thought of it, I may never have seen that connection.

I suppose this is an odd reformulation of David Allen's "Getting Things Done": write down what's on your mind so it's not taking up mindshare, but work it into your system where it makes sense. That frees up those extra CPU cycles for future points of brilliance.