What works for one does not work for all... at least, that's the theory

I was thinking about how the development of the writing process happens.

Word clouds - going from big world to little world, or various techniques of note taking.

It still remains "what works for me" in a lot of cases, depending on who you ask. I spoke with a writer who says that he has a single word that he writes on a piece of paper, then asks himself how to build an entire story around that world. Sounds freaky, but when you read his material, he creates a complex environment based on his method. But that works for him, not so much me.

Another writer I know hasn't written anything except dialogue for his stories, then creates the narrative around it. He said that the dialogue creates the narrative in a way that if he built the two together, it wouldn't work as a first draft.

I take a lot of notes with my work. A lot of them. Sometimes it is an idea, a lot of conversational bits that I hear from people that I like, and several tidbits of information. These notes, I put into one large file, and when I feel it is ready, I make it into a story. Some of the stuff fits, the other stuff that doesn't gets discarded. After I re-write the story once, I then go section by section, remove any uninteresting whole segments, and try to rebuild a more interesting, coherent story that really moves.

Everybody is different. I am no exception in that. But it's what works for me. I am curious what works for other people.

Sleep, Muses and Ideas

Funny how some ideas come to me in my sleep. I had a friend show me a lot of ideas he had which came from his sleep, which reminded me more of the film Mulholland Drive than anything. That's because our dreams are mismashes of ideas, jumbled at such a rate that we only remember one or two of the periods within the dream.

I had a muse last night which gave me a huge idea. But that wasn't the point. The muse was an interesting person with a dynamic I can't explain, but the ideas were free-flowing. I probably have enough for a big story because of it. Luckily, muses don't have copyright protection on ideas they merely dance around.

Ideas: I keep them in note form. A lot of different ones on my IPod touch or various computer files. Sometimes it is a saying or some instance that I found humorous. I saw a man on Saturday night which I created a fiction for, and it really clicked with the story I was drafting at the time. I love when that happens.