There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
–Maya Angelou
The process of packing, whether for a trip or to move to a new location, often results in a mental divergence from the goal of closing the suitcase and toward the memories that are invoked by the particular objects you are packing. Perhaps it’s the subtle aroma of an old paperback book you’ve cracked open that recalls memories of reading a particularly gripping novel under the golden afternoon sun of a lazy summer day. Or maybe it’s an old photograph that prompts memories of a new and exciting time in your life that you sometimes wish you could revisit.
Then again, it could be something like a story idea list, a hastily scribbled assortment of characters, events, settings, or plots that, once upon a time, struck you as something you must write but for some reason never did. I have such a list. It is a long list. Occasionally, I rediscover it hidden among the files and folders I use every day.
At those times, I am confronted with three choices: I can despair over the fact that I’ve never forced myself to make time to flesh out those ideas, I can sit down and force myself to flesh them out, or I can strike them from the list and abandon them as bad ideas and wastes of time. I can tell you that I seldom use that last option. That is why I refer to my idea list as the never-clean closet.
Although I am not fool enough to believe that every idea is a good idea, I am optimistic enough to hope that I can take the ideas and sketches I’ve jotted down and flesh them out, if for no other reason than to see where they lead. How can you know whether your story is a good one unless you write it first? Alas, there are literally dozens of ideas on the list, which technically spans multiple files, and only so many minutes in a day that I can devote to writing for my own pleasure and edification.
Thus, the never-clean closet remains stacked full of could-bes and maybe-somedays, always with the rationale that any idea struck from it will be because I have either developed a finished story from it or because I finally attempted to do so and failed miserably. After all, the goal of the list is not to strike chores from it, but to explore the worlds that are suggested by it.
Perhaps I should add one more idea to the end of that list: sit down, shut up, and start writing.