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Four Tips to Help You Organise the Overwhelm of Having Too Many Ideas When Writing

Writer's picture: Daniel PaiceDaniel Paice

Four tips and tricks to help you organise the overwhelm of having too many ideas when writing


Being a writer means being creative, and being creative means that there is — more or less — a constant stream of ideas that want to be written (whether or not they see the night of day!). With this, ultimately, comes a sense of overwhelm, because there are too many ideas. Practically, you can't completely satisfy your mind and the stream of ideas.


It can take months or years to write a book, and if you have ideas for ten different books, that is going to take you around ten years to complete (roughly speaking, if we apply the same logic, without considering the many variables).

I'm in a bit of a quiet place with my writing — in terms of knowing that I have several still-to-be-completed projects, but not knowing in which direction I would like to go next. And, to be honest, life feels a bit too full; a bit too intense. So, although I'm maintaining my writing, I'm having to slow it down quite dramatically. It is making me consider further how to manage my projects, and the inherent stream of ideas. That in itself can become overwhelming, which can then lead to doing nothing at all — which does nothing but compound on the original overwhelm.


Separate your ideas into genre or form


What I mean by this is fairly self-explanatory. By doing this, it allows you to have an overview of absolutely everything you're looking at, and therefore, mentally comprehend where to go next. This can dramatically reduce the overwhelm, which in turn improves your perspective towards writing overall.


For example, you might separate your writing into your poetry projects, your non-fiction projects, and your fiction projects. In this case, you would have three lists. From there, you would choose which of the one of the three lists you would like to focus on, and pick a project from that list. You might decide that your poetry projects are nearer to completion, and therefore you would like to follow them through before continuing with your nonfiction.


You can see, by separating your projects into categories and lists, it allows you to see the wood for the trees. It is a way in.

Split all writing time into planning and writing


We all have limited time in our lives. If we are lucky, we may have an hour to write in a day. With this in mind, I would suggest splitting this hour in half.


Half an hour is for planning projects that you have lingering in your mind. Get them onto paper before you forget them. This half an hour is completely flexible as long as you're planning. Once you have completed this part, spend the next half an hour writing on your current project.


You can you see how you're using these sections of time to think about the future, but also focus in on the project that you're currently writing. The idea is to get the thoughts on the paper, and allow you to focus on your current project. When you are able to complete your current project, you will then be able to move on and progress to other projects. It is okay if this process develops and changes over time.

Restrict your writing time


In the previous section, I only gave you half an hour to write. That doesn't seem very long. However, it depends how you utilise that half an hour. Put it this way: half an hour of consistent writing is much better than half an hour of thinking about the story in terms of productivity. (That does not mean to say that thinking about your story is not conducive to writing, but if your aim is to write a book, you need to be able to put these thoughts onto paper.


When you know that half an hour is the only time you've got, you're more likely to make the most of that time. Plus, you can subconsciously use the rest of the day to start thinking about what you want to spend the half an hour writing about — so when it has becomes writing, you can just focus on getting as many words onto the page possible. In terms of making most of your time, it can be useful to put on a timer. I've spoken a lot about the Pomodoro Technique in the past, and a similar principle could be applied here. Putting on a timer gamifies the experience — and therefore gives you the motivation to keep going, and maintain a habit.

Don't be afraid to write as many plans as you like


I've spoken about limiting your ability plan to a scheduled time, but that does not mean to say that you could spend the planning time planning the same thing for several days. So if you are dedicating half an hour of planning on whatever, that does not mean to say that you couldn't work on planning the same project for a week or so. The idea of focusing on planning as many works as possible is that you get the ideas out of your head, so that you can focus on your current project. It also allows you to remember in detail — when you come back to these projects — what was actually going on. It also means that it gives you plenty of options when you have finished your current project. In theory, you have a constant conveyor belt of different ideas to work with once you have finished one.


It is plain to see that my ideas centre around restricting your time, so that you hone in — and focus on — doing what is important and limiting your ability to perfect things when it is not necessary. After all, the editing stage of the writing process is there for a reason.

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