Your Personalized Butterfly Net

“The air is full of tunes. I just reach up and pick one.”

Willie Nelson

In our time together, here and on the podcast, we’ve learned how to dream in our authentic way about everything related to our writerly life, from our studio to our staff, from what we want to say to who we want to say it to. 

Once we discover our own way of dreaming, we have so much great stuff running around in our imaginations we can hardly handle it all. 

In fact, that’s the challenge.

Have you had the experience of being totally inspired to create a story, plan a novel, compose that epic poem, and yet when you sit in front of your laptop or take Mont Blanc in hand (we can still dream!), it runs away like your family when you declare a workday in the yard?

What the Sam Hill happened to all that inspiration? All those great ideas? Those whole scenes you could see so clearly before your buns hit the chair? 

It’s all still in there, actually. We writers just have to discover our own unique ways of gathering it up and keeping it in a safe place until we’re ready for it.

That’s what we’re about today.

Butterfly net?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever chased butterflies. 

Yeah, I’m not thinking most of us are lepidopterists (much less even know what that means), so your own metaphor for capturing your ideas is in order. It might help to consider your answers to a few questions to arrive at what your net might look like.

#1 

What is your image of the ideas you’ve dreamed which become elusive when you try to shape them into something coherent? Something like:

• Getting three cats into their carriers at once?
• Chasing blueberries that have escaped from the plastic thing in the grocery store?
• Trying to catch snowflakes in your hands?

How does that experience appear in your wonderful imagination?

#2

How would you go about bringing that image under control? Something like:

• Shining a laser beam into the carrier? 
• Grabbing another container of berries and making a run for it?
• Walking in the snow and letting it cover you?

Don’t think writing. Just play with your image. Even this part of writing should be 90% play.

#3

What might the idea-capturing version of that be? Something like:

• Luring your inspirations back with something shiny? Like a really cool journal or a creative vision board or a stack of colored folders?
• Letting those other ideas go and dreaming new ones and dropping them one by one on pieces of paper into a basket?
• Getting that inspiration all over you by immersing yourself in it, experiencing it, letting its magic seep into your soul?

#4

How we do something is usually how we do everything. How does your essential nature tell you it wants to corral those ideas? For example:

• If you plan your vacations down to the last detail, then you’ll be happiest creating an amazing filing system complete with color-coded folders and stickers and a master list in various fonts.
• If you just book the flight and wing it when you get there, chances are you’d love creating a mobile to hang from the ceiling and clipping your ideas to it as they come to you.
• If you make a plan for the big things and let the little stuff happen when you arrive, you’ll be amazing at combining some facsimile of those two approaches.

Yes, butterfly net … Yours!  

My decades as a writer have shown me that devising a way to gather the dream thoughts so they’re there when I need them is as creative as the ideas themselves. It’s not a waste of time (when you could be writing) to:

• Make or find the perfect journal
• Set up a Pinterest board
• Keep a running recording of you speaking them in a variety of voices
• Line a shelf with labeled bins to toss stuff into 

Trust me, you will “waste” a lot more time sitting in front of a blank screen or staring at a wordless page if you don’t treat yourself to a delightful way to catch those butterflies with a curated net. I have it on the best authority.

A Thought To Ponder: What creative method most appeals to you? What’s one step you can take toward setting that up? Just thinking about this makes me want to take myself to the nearest Office Max!

Until next time …

Scribble on!