I’ve mentioned the perils of Shiny New Idea Syndrome before. That’s when you’re slogging away at a book, often in a phase that’s less than fun, like the middle of a first draft or proofreading, and then a brilliant new idea strikes you. This idea is a guaranteed bestseller that will make your career, and it’s a fully formed book. You need to drop everything to write it.

And then once you start writing it and you get past the beginning, it becomes hard, and another Shiny New Idea strikes, so you abandon the project and start on that.

This is why a lot of writers who have great ideas and spend a lot of time writing never manage to sell a book. They never actually finish one because they’re always chasing that Shiny New Idea. I started trying to write novels early in my teens, but I didn’t finish one until I was in my 20s because of this. Not only is the Shiny New Idea a distraction, but it’s usually not fully formed, so if you drop what you’re working on to write the Shiny New Idea, you’ll quickly run out of steam so that you’re tempted by the next idea that comes along.

I’ve learned over the years that the Shiny New Ideas are a good sign. Creativity breeds more creativity. The more you write, the more ideas you’ll have. If Shiny New Ideas are coming to you, that means you’re in a good creative space. But that doesn’t mean you should abandon your current project to pursue them. It also doesn’t mean ignoring them.

When I get struck by a new idea, I do a brain dump and write down everything I know about it. Sometimes in this process I’ll find myself making up even more. I just keep writing until I’ve got it all captured. Generally, even in ideas I think are fully formed, I’ll only end up with a page or two of information. That brilliant, fully formed book is really just a situation and a character, maybe an inciting incident. Once all that’s out of my head, I can get back to the current project and finish it. I can add to the new idea as things come to me, and by the time I finish the current project, that new idea may be developed enough that I can start doing serious work on it, like fleshing out the characters and working on a plot.

I have a current case study for that. I’m proofreading a book, which isn’t the most exciting work. I was chatting with my agent and mentioned this notion I had. It wasn’t even to the level of an idea. It was a kind of story in a kind of setting. She asked what the story would be, where the conflict would be, and I had no idea. That night, the story came to me and I felt like I had a good foundation for a story. When I wrote it all down, I had about three pages in a composition book. A lot of it was backstory and setting, with just a hint of what the plot would be. The plot part was essentially that two-sentence description like you might see about a movie on a streaming service.

Then last night the opening scene came to me. As I lay thinking about it after I woke up this morning, I felt like the whole book was coming together. I got out of bed and wrote down everything — and I had a page and a half in the composition book. I had a good opening line and some things that could happen in the first scene, which contains some of the worldbuilding. It always feels more fleshed out in my head than it is on the page. I do think this is a viable story idea, but it needs a lot more work before I’ll be ready to start writing it. In the meantime, I need to finish that proofreading.

I have had one instance since I started doing this for a living when I did drop the current project for the Shiny New Idea. I was working on the book that became A Fairy Tale and was really struggling with it. It just wasn’t coming together. Then I got the idea for Rebel Mechanics and started writing down what I knew about it — and ended up with a nearly complete synopsis. I decided it was worth putting the struggle book aside and working on the new idea. I did a lot of research to develop the world, then I had a proposal ready to go to my agent within a few months of getting the idea. That book sold to a publisher, and I ended up independently publishing A Fairy Tale, so it was probably a good call.

Now we’ll see how this new idea develops. I have most of March’s work planned, but when I get two projects off my plate I’ll be ready to start something new, and then I’ll see which project in development is closer to being ready to write.