Konmari Your Story Ideas

Keep the ones that spark joy; ditch the rest

The Story Writer’s Path

Keep the ones that spark joy; ditch the rest

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

You’ve heard of the Konmari system. It was created by Marie Kondo as a method of getting control of the stuff in your life. It’s not minimalism and you don’t have to get rid of everything. The idea is to ditch the things that no longer bring you joy.

Her book about the system has been a mega-bestseller and now Marie has her own TV show on Netflix, in which she helps hapless messy people get themselves sorted. Part of the reason she’s been such a success is that simple standard she uses to decide if you keep or ditch: does it spark joy?

I think we can all agree that most homes have too much stuff. (As I wrote that sentence, I couldn’t help but think of the homeless problem. But that’s a topic for a different day and place.) And we writers are not immune to this epidemic.

Writers and their stuff

Like most writers, I’ve got shelves and boxes and cartons and piles of books. And, yes, many of them spark joy. In the old days, you’d have to peel books out of my tightly clenched hands before I’d consider getting rid of them. Nowadays, I know I can find just about any book on the internet, either through a used bookstore or as an Ebook, so I’m less rabid about hanging on to them.

But then there are papers. A whole other story. I try, oh how I try, not to print too much and waste too much paper. And yet, I do. And the things I’ve printed are a terrible mess. When I teach a class, I invariably create handouts for it, and there are always a few left over. But when I teach the class again, can I find those handouts that I’ve printed out? Oh, no. So I print out more. And the same thing happens over again. So random stacks of paper not necessarily limited to handouts (because sometimes it is helpful to print out a manuscript, right?0tower in my office.

And what about old journals? From where I now sit I can look across the room and see stacks of them on a shelf. There are more, many more, in tubs and boxes, stored away. Every so often I think I’m going to just ditch them. Then I open one and start reading and I can’t bear to. So there they sit. Probably until the day Marie Kondo herself appears at my office door to help me sort through them.

So yeah. Books, papers and journals are a pernicious form of clutter for most of us writers. And I guess — I guess — I could be convinced to start going through them with an eye toward paring down. (Except those journals. Just not sure about that.)

Writers and their ideas

But here’s the real clencher, people. What about our ideas?

You may have them stored in notebooks or spirals, or files on your computer, or even just in your head. (If you’ve got bandwidth for that, God love you.) Me? I have them in all of the above-mentioned places. Ideas. I’ve got tons of them. I write lists of them every day. I have a file on my Google Keep app. I have tons of folders of them in cloud storage. And I have dedicated idea notebooks galore.

And that’s not all — some of these ideas have turned into ill-fated story starts. A few paragraphs of a story here, a couple chapters of a novel there. A list of scenes for a novel I was so, so excited about that never panned out. They are partially-formed ideas that went nowhere.

I have long maintained that keeping an idea book is a wonderful thing for a writer. I love the idea of all kinds of random ideas — a character, a thought about an essay, a line of dialogue — get scrawled in an idea book. I’ve always believed that once I close the cover the ideas procreate, like randy rabbits.

But lately I’ve been rethinking this.

Probably because these days my brain is full. I’m sure yours is, too. It is full of news stories, and blog posts, and clips from videos that I swear I’m going to return to, and longform stories I keep open on my browser to read in fits and starts, and the stories of my writing clients and students, and places to stay when I teach in France and England, and the movies I’ve seen recently, the latest pix on Instagram. And oh yeah — there are my own stories in progress, too.

It’s too much.

Add to it all the backlog of ideas that pull at me, or more likely, molder in old spirals and I start to feel like a hoarder. Some day they’ll find me in my office buried under the weight of my ideas.

Most of these ideas are not going to go anywhere. And neither are those story starts. And yet I struggle to throw them away, just like I can’t quite get myself to ditch my journals. And so I have decided to go full-tilt Kon Mari on them and see what happens. Here’s my plan:

How to lighten your story idea load

1. First, I’m going to find all the half-full idea notebooks and files and scraps of paper. I’ll make a stack of the physical ones and create a folder for the computer files.

2. Next, I’ll sort. Ideas all go in one pile or folder. Half-finished stories and novels go in another.

3. And now comes the fun part. Going through them all. I’ll start with the ideas, because an un-fleshed out idea is much easier to ditch than a story started. Not that either will be easy to get rid of. But many of the ideas will not longer interest me. And some will be outdated. Still others will have been used already. Into the recycling can they all go.

4. Now, sort the stories. Arrrrghhhh! So much harder. Each still-born novel and story still holds so much potential. But the same criteria I used for ideas hold true here: look for the outdated ones, the ones no longer of interest, or the ones already used.

5. And after going through the above four steps, what results is a nice, neat pile of ideas that will be of interest in the coming year. And who knows, maybe one of them will not only spark joy, but spark a whole new novel.

And so, voila! Ideas kon-maried and sorted. Writer’s brain clear and clean and ready to get back to the page.

Please, don’t get me wrong. Writers need ideas, and lots of them. I’ve written articles about how to get them. They are our lifeblood. So I’m not anti-idea by any stretch of the imagination. But I am already feeling lighter and freer at just the thought of letting some of my ideas go.

You Need Lots of Ideas for Your Stories
Here’s how to find themwritingcooperative.com

I don’t think those ideas I let go will be lost. Because if they are meant to be written by me, they will come back around. And if not, odds are good they’ll land at another writer’s feet. And he’ll be absolutely delighted to bring them to life. Ideas are floating around out in the ether, waiting to be plucked and it’s up to us to release the ones we aren’t using.