That awkward moment in the morning when you realize that the amazing, groundbreaking idea you developed the night before under warm blankets - that you thought you had totally interiorized and therefore found needless to write down - has forever vanished into nothingness.
Please help me elaborate the loss.
it's not lost - it's in there somewhere - find a way to access it - you can contemplate the subject, just letting your mind wander, and it will come back to you (helps if you don't try to force your mind to think about it, just let it wander, and pay attention. It's how I manage to find things I've misplaced. Works like a charm).
Or get a cheap notebook and keep it on your nightstand for those moments. That way, you don't have to leave the covers and you can avoid this. Kind of neurotic, but I keep a notebook in every room of the house. You'd be surprised how many great ideas come to you on the toilet.
Always keep a notebook on the nightstand for this.
My suggestion is to take an extremely long shower and try to think about what you were thinking about before you came up with the idea. Try to get back to the train of thought that led you into it.
If you're desperate you can go to a hypnotist.
I've had these lost ideas before and sometimes they come back to me at the most random times. Days, weeks later even.
Thank you guys :)
You won't believe it, but I actually have a notebook on my nightstand. I was just so confident about my memory that I rolled over and passed out.
It was sheer panic this morning when my mind resulted blank. Now it's slowly coming back, it always sort of do. Still, I should take notes every time.
@razor: showers are definitely a great place for inspiration.
i used to keep a notebook by the bed to record the genius ideas I came up with during my pre sleep phase.
Until I re read the things I had written, at which point I realized I should really stop sleep writing. This sentence comes to mind:
"People who keep their frying pans at the front of the cupboard have more sex. OOoooooh grilled cheese."
I think my days as a smart person are behind me.
Now I keep a notebook in the car, instead, because my real good ideas come to me on long drives, which in my case, is every day to and from work for an hour.
Meat Seeker -- you write in your journal while you drive? :o
I've forgotten so many 'great ideas' it's painful. A lot of those come to me right as I'm falling asleep, and I, like you, Flaminia, keep a journal by my bedside but think I've got the story memorized only to wake up in the morning and cry over the loss of my magnum opus idea.
These ideas very rarely come back to me, but it's okay. I have a million more, I don't have time to write them all into stories anyway.
Haha oh dear god, no, I just write everything down when I stop at wherever my destination is. I just talk to myself a lot when I drive, and when I come up with something good I repeat it to death, and if i still like it, then i write it down.
If you love an idea, you have to let it go. And if it never comes back, it wasn't meant to be.
Ahah I like that updated proverb, Averydoll.
Meat Seeker, I am glad to hear that. I've seen people do so many crazy things when driving that jotting something down in a notebook wouldn't surprise me at all.
People should have to pass an 'intelligence test' before they're given a driver's license.
Fixed:
I´ll put notebook and pen under the pillow. Whodaboss!
@Arkadia: In my experience, writing while you drive is no big thing. Even to be encouraged. On the other hand, everybody drives on the wrong side of the road where you live, so it would pay for you to be extra on-your-toes. But if you come to the US you're good to go. Hell, I wrote my marriage vows while I was driving...to my wedding.
I bitch about people who text while driving and people who talk on the phone while driving. And then I eat crunch wrap supremes from Taco Bell while driving. If you have ever been in traffic with me, you are lucky to be alive. There is nothing like being at a red light and giving the person next to you with a cell phone a snarky look while holding a food product the size of your head in one hand.
I just assume the ideas I forget are bad ones, anyway misremembering isn't really a bad thing. I'm not an immediate kinda writer, treating ideas like ghosts and letting them haunt me until I exorcise them onto paper makes them seem somewhat more concrete. Ideas come by so swiftly and I would think everyone is amazing if I didn't allow my bad memory to act as an elimination process.
The greatest example of this is Kubla Khan, one of my favorite poems of all time.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,
where Alph, the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
-
of course, the relevant bit comes later:
A damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw
She was an Abyssnian maid, and on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora
Could I revive within me her symphony and song
To such deep delight t'would win me that with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That floating dome, those caves of ice!
And all who heard would see it there,
And all would cry, "Beware! Beware!"
His flashing eyes, his floating hair,
Weave a circle round him thrice,
and close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed,
and drank the milk of Paradise.
-
Coleridge wrote the poem in a fit of Opium fueled inspiration, but halfway through he got distracted and forgot the rest of it. What remains is still an amazing poem. My memory is really good, so this rarely happens to me, but when it does I wish desperately to revive within me the symphony and song of that Abyssnian maid.
Often, in class, when I am supposed to be taking notes, I recite that poem instead. And when I forget a few verses I smile and think, "That's true to the spirit of the piece."
Awesome poem, Nick.
I would readily swap notebook under the pillow with opium (under the pillow). I'd still not remember the bloody idea, but the fuck I might remotely give would wave at me from an exoplanet so far away - I've already forgot what I was talking about.
It's all about the absinthe. Oh and cocaine.
Yes.
And laudanum. Laudanum makes for the ultimate poète maudit who never bothers taking notes. Or, who takes notes but eventually forget about them. Or, who remembers about notes but while writing thinks, "Ta hell with those notes. This is a whole new better idea. And in all grace, I can't recall where I threw yesternight's papers anyway. Oh that's what I had for dinner."
The coolest thing happened this morning. Some sentences came to me in a dream, and when I woke up I actually remembered them and wrote em down.
But I wanted to ask: Is any of you a compulsive notes recorder? Do you actually disappear in public lavatories to write stuff? Because sometimes I do take a lot of notes that I won't eventually use, say.
