While no two writers are exactly alike, I presume all of you have this experience in common: You're snug in your bed, teetering on the cusp of sleep, when you're struck by a brilliant story idea. A real one-in-a-million. A concept with best-seller potential or an epiphany that solves a complicated plot problem in one of your WIPs. And you're totally going to remember it in the morning.
So, how’d that work out for you? Yeah, me too.
It seems no solution exists to combat this problem—no lock for your mind to keep those ephemeral treasures secure. Your ideas, like half-remembered dreams, fade away upon waking, leaving as quickly and suddenly as they came until—like a thief in the night—daylight has robbed you of your own thoughts. If only you could deposit those priceless treasures into a safer vault!
As it turns out, there is a solution. A surprisingly simple one… in theory. Yet it might be one of the hardest pieces of advice to implement. How can you remember those brilliant ideas come morning? Take note, friends.
Get your butt out of bed.
Yes, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s the only way. I don’t care how tired you are, who you might disturb while slipping out of the bedroom, or how early you must wake up tomorrow. Excuses are novel killers. Get out of bed and write it down. Now.
In the moment, while sleep pulls your head down onto that soft pillow, and the warm blankets hold you in their seductive embrace, it seems impossible to resist their allure. But you must. If not, that idea will die in your sleep and never return. There’s only one way to keep it alive: Rip those blankets off, run to your notepad, laptop, journal, or whatever, and write that idea down onto something tangible. You’ll curse me in the moment; you’ll thank me in the morning.
Now that I’ve given you this unpleasant but necessary advice, here comes the disclaimer: Remember how Cinderella’s beautiful coach turned back into an old pumpkin at the stroke of midnight? Yeah. Turns out, our magical midnight inspirations sometimes suffer a similar fate. Not every idea we have while half-asleep is as cool as we thought, come morning.
I’ll admit that I have, at times, yanked myself from my toasty bed and jotted down a ‘brilliant’ idea, only to go over what I wrote the next morning and find myself gobsmacked at how unbelievably stupid it is. It only seemed good at the time because I was mentally impaired by exhaustion. Having admitted that, however, I stand by my previous advice. While about a quarter of my night-time story ideas turn into rotten old pumpkins once the spell wears off, so to speak, the majority retain their beauty and magic. And if roughly three out of four prove worth the effort and temporary suffering, that’s more than enough for me!