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How to Tackle Overflowing Ideas

You heard me right

I am not going to say that it is necessarily bad. Neither am I saying that you should stop your brain from thinking about new stuff. But if you find the staggering number of your drafts overwhelming, I have been there, too.

It is not about your reluctance to publish, or about your doubts on the topics. It is more about the overflowing ideas within your head.

These overflowing ideas are preventing you from finishing any story.

Do not delete your drafts, yet. You are sorting them out instead, with me.

Titling Problems

You may operate the same way as I do when you have this case. I always put the title first and work my way out until the end. I do not create outlines or anything to keep the flow of my story.

Although there are benefits to making outlines, I do not think it works for me. There is no ‘one size fits all’ rule to writing, after all.

Having the title, in the beginning, helped me show the direction of the story. It also left some room for me to grow the idea organically. I also find that the idea comes to me in a sentence. Just a sentence — usually a catchy sentence that represents the intro and conclusion of most of my writings.

However, this way has its unique curses as I have observed and experienced myself.

If you have problems with giving title to your story, let it marinate for a while. Or re-read your story and catch the most presentable part of your writing. Do not forget to make it engaging.

Caught Up in Jargonic Phrases

Sometimes, our brains are so overstimulated that they generate too many ideas. If you are the type to come up with the title first, then you understand the constant need to record your ideas. I usually do this in my Medium mobile app. I write many titles that some of which mean nothing and give no significance than being jargon.

Do not delete them, but find other stories that have similar messages and put the idea there.

Examples:

(1) Brain Dump v. Brain Constipate;

(2) Our Brains’ Bandwidth to Generate Ideas; and

(3) Finding Your “Ah-ha!”

What the f-word do they mean? Exactly, they mean nothing more than jargon. Brain Dump, Bandwidth, and Ah-ha revolve around the way we think and come up with an idea, especially in getting our points across to others.

The solution to this problem is to merge your stories into one and save your jargons as jargons within the story — reformulate them into a hooky takeaway/premise if possible.

But jargons are not bad. They do not have to be. Most of them contain specific meanings and specialized usage. Use them to your advantage and be careful about what you pick!

One Message, Several Means to Convey

This is in essence the opposite of jargons. In this case, you already found the premise. Or you got the thesis sentence right, but cannot wrap your head around the approach. Without consciously knowing, you end up writing several pieces with an identical message.

It is useful to work out several angles to a story. There is no clear-cut way to solve this. I am only saying that eliminating several of the stories with these symptoms can be useful.

If you suffer from this problem, you can start choosing one angle that you think is the best and work your way until the story completes.

‘Fashion’ Words a.k.a. Buzzwords

We always have the most abused word of the year. Overusing buzzwords can make you look pretentious. If the problem you are presenting in the story is big, then it will be big enough to represent itself.

Buzzwords do not raise the importance of your cause, they make the cause meaningless, instead.

Eliminate and avoid them in the title!

Focus

Yes, the last one is obvious. Putting your mind into finishing a task should not be hard, but it can be. It is funny.

See the bigger picture. Get your stories done one word at a time. By the time you published one story, you will go for more.

Happy writing!

© Adrian Njoto

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