Organizing Your Story Ideas

In our last lesson, we generated a list of potential story ideas. But what do you do with a notebook full of sparks and no clear direction? Let’s explore how to find the best ideas in that creative mess.

This lesson introduces a triage system to help you decide which sparks to explore now, which to save for later, and which to set aside for now.

The Idea Triage System

What is a triage system? It’s a way to sort and prioritize a list to make sure you deal with the most urgent ones first. For our purposes, this means sorting our ideas to find the ones we are most curious about. The ideas that we are excited to work on right now.

Let’s use the list I made in the last lesson:

Triaging Your Ideas

For this process, you can work from your original list and move each idea to its new home. This might be a new list, a Codex entry, or a post-it note.

Explore Now

You’ll know these ideas when you see them—they have an immediate energy. Does reading one make your mind buzz with questions? Can you already picture scenes or characters? That’s a sign to start exploring.

These ideas are ready for their own space. Consider moving them to a new page or document where you can explore it further. In Novelcrafter, you might create a new Novel Project for it and drop the idea into a Codex entry. This way you have a dedicated place to explore your new spark.

Not Yet

These are for concepts that interest you, but you don’t feel a strong pull to write them at this moment. They might need more time to grow, or you might not be in the right creative mood for that particular story.

Move this idea to a dedicated “Not Yet” or “Incubator” list. In Novelcrafter, you could add this to a “Story Ideas” custom category in your “Brainstorming Chaos” project’s Codex. Maybe next year, you’ll find the missing piece that makes the idea work.

Recycle

These are ideas that, upon reflection, don’t excite you. Maybe they feel unoriginal, too silly, or you’ve simply lost interest in them.

It’s tempting to delete these ideas, but try to avoid that! Instead, move them to a dedicated recycle or archive section. You might never write a story about washing machines, but you might use the idea of a portal in an unusual place to inspire a different story in the future.

Author’s note

I have a massive “Compost Pile” in my Snippets. I often look through it when I’m stuck on a work in progress. Recently, I found a piece of dialogue I wrote three years ago for a character that I didn’t end up pursuing, and it ended up being the perfect line for the morally grey love interest in my current project.

Recap

We learned how to take a messy list of story sparks and sort it using the Idea Triage System. By dividing our ideas into Explore Now, Not Yet, and the Recycle, we can focus our creative energy on the ideas that excite us most, without permanently deleting anything.

Now that you’ve picked an idea (or two) to explore, how can you develop it into a story premise? Whether you’re building upon a genre idea, a world-building detail, or a character that fascinates you, we’ll walk you through it in our next lessons.