I am always swamped with ideas.

An overactive imagination is both my greatest blessing, and sometimes a rather pesky curse. I wouldn’t be without it for anything, because it means I always have an idea when I need one; but it’s also an ongoing challenge.

I have ideas filed away by the dozen. I have notebooks full of one-paragraph and two-page sketches for short stories that may or may not end up being written one day. I have bits of random dialogue waiting to find a home in some story or other. I have lists of titles without stories, titles which just sound so nice I didn’t want to forget them. I have a handful of antiquated novel plots from my early teen years, mostly for nostalgia’s sake, but partly because I have a touch of the pack-rat instinct that says not to throw away anything that might conceivably be useful one day. (I did go through my older notes recently and cleared out a lot of stuff I realized wasn’t going to be any use; I’m getting a little more practical in this area.)

I have a few false starts of novel and novella drafts that I haven’t given up hope on. I also have concepts, character lists and a few sketchy notes for novels that I firmly intend to write one day. And then I have a dozen quick outlines or concepts for novels that at this stage are pipe dreams, but which I had to write down just on the magical off-chance that someday I will find myself capable of writing them.

Story ideas, you see, are not bound by time or space or one’s own capabilities. It doesn’t take any effort at all to dream of writing an epic family saga spanning thirty or a hundred years. It’s easy to fudge the technical details in your mind when you’re captivated by a plot that centers around subjects you know practically nothing about—aviation, horse racing, railroads, factories, oil drilling. With the experience I’m gaining from researching Dearest Lieutenant, I know I can master those subjects if I really want to write about them someday—one at a time, please—but the task would be no joke. Ideas are free, but writing a book costs time and effort.

Occasionally I catch myself saying, “Why didn’t somebody just write this or make a movie of it in 1946 so it would exist for me to enjoy and I wouldn’t have to do all the work?”

The practical challenge of the overactive imagination is, of course, that it barges in on you at the most inconvenient times. It tempts you with those glittering new ideas when you’re supposed to be concentrating faithfully on just one or two projects till completion. Learning to manage it is an ongoing thing for me, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. You see, I’ve spent most of my life, from early childhood on up, entertaining myself by making up stories in my head. Some of them dance pleasantly in my mind for a while, then evaporate painlessly when it becomes clear they don’t have enough substance to be worth the time. But when an idea keeps coming back, keeps gaining complexity and keeps hinting at future promise…then I begin to take it seriously.

So I write it down.

Even if it’s just one paragraph, I commit the concept and perhaps a few character names to paper; maybe a few key scenes or lines of dialogue; and that satisfies the anxious little corner of my mind that insists “This is good; you don’t want to lose it!” And then I go back to whatever I’m supposed to be writing. Whether the captured concept is for next month, next year or next decade, I know it’ll be there when I need it and I can rest easier. Even if my imagination never does.

(In this twenty-first century, I sometimes create a private Pinterest board. Somehow that seems like even more of a commitment than pen and paper, so I usually wait till an idea has been upgraded from the pipe-dream stage to the “I’m definitely going to write this someday” stage—but the way some of the pipe dreams have been nagging at me lately, I wonder if Pinterest would help keep them quiet.)

Seriously—I have jotted notes for a couple of series, at least one trilogy, two of those epic family sagas, and at least one sequel to something I’ve written but not published yet. Silly? Perhaps. But it doesn’t cost anything to dream.

Recently I came across a link to a 1964 interview with Harper Lee, one of the last she gave before withdrawing from public life. It’s an interesting read, and a few passages particularly struck me. For instance, Lee’s response when asked what she most deplored about modern American writing (and this was over fifty years ago!):

I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing, and especially in the American theatre, is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this—the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea. It takes time and patience and effort to turn out a work of art, and few people seem willing to go all the way.

I see a great deal of sloppiness and I deplore it. I suppose the reason I’m so down on it is because I see tendencies in myself to be sloppy, to be satisfied with something that’s not quite good enough. I think writers today are too easily pleased with their work. This is sad…There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

This bit about developing imagination in childhood, one of the things Lee captured so well in To Kill A Mockingbird, in many ways reminds me of my own childhood—make-believe and storytelling was always front and center, whatever toys I may have had to play with.

This was my childhood: If I went to a film once a month it was pretty good for me, and for all children like me. We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn’t have much money. Nobody had any money. We didn’t have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imagination most of the time. We devised things; we were readers, and we would transfer everything we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama.

Did you never play Tarzan when you were a child? Did you never tramp through the jungle or refight the battle of Gettysburg in some form or fashion? We did. Did you never live in a tree house and find the whole world in the branches of a chinaberry tree? We did.

In retrospect it’s odd, and perhaps a little sad, to read this interview of an author apparently in the midst of her career and talking freely about future ambitions and novels, while knowing she never wrote another. It makes one wonder what might have been.

I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better… In other words all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.

You can find the full interview here.