Potato is yum

I have a lot of bad writing ideas. I’m currently writing this book yeah? But it’s not my first idea nor did I think of the whole world in one sitting. In fact, it’s probably a stitched together mess of five years of changing tons of stuff about it. The whole world is actually based off a D&D campaign I did a few years back mixed with some stuff I did on a minecraft server 7 years ago mixed with stuff from my favorite games and movies. So yeah, ideas. I get a lot of them. And guess what? Most of my ideas are garbage. So I figured out this pretty easy way to see if an idea is good or not.

Fifty words to tell a story using the idea. Fifty words is pretty easy to throw together in about five minutes tops and can give a pretty decent idea on the value of an idea. If an idea looks good I’ll throw it into the mixing pot and if it looks bad it gets lost in my forgetful memory. If an idea takes more than fifty words to write up, it’s probably too big to fit into any of my current projects. If an idea can’t fill up fifty words it’s probably not interesting enough for me to actually care enough about it.

Sometimes I run into a big idea that is just too big to pass up and this is when I use fifty words to try and narrow down the scope of the idea down to something that works. Slimming down really big ideas is extremely useful as it can turn something clumsy and difficult to use into something really interesting.

Obviously, I wouldn’t recommend fifty words for everyone. That’s just the number I found works for me. It could be more or less for others. Likely it would take more words. I’ve heard numbers like 200 or 250 thrown around in some places. But for me, I stick with 50 because my time is just that limited.