Balancing Backlog: When the Well Overflows

Let's talk about balancing ideas and projects. I can't think of a single writer I know who doesn't have ideas that float around in their head to wake them up or keep them up at night -- and typically ideas not related to the current WIP. Oh, what's a poor writer to do?

Are you the type of writer who has a massive backlog of ideas to explore in your stories or the type who deals with one idea at a time and then turns on the idea machine afterward? How do store that backlog, whether digital or on paper?

Marian Allen: I have so many projects already in the pipeline, I don't have the brain capacity to do anything with new ones. EXCEPT! I do Story A Day May every year, and those flashes of ideas are great to prompt daily stories. I also have a big folder with story ideas in it, and, in the rare times when I need something to write, I dig into that. I've used it for many stories.

Jay Requard: Massive backlog. It is currently all in notebooks but I'm transcribing one part to digital after the baby got a hold of it.

Elizabeth Donald: Ideas are fleeting little butterflies that need to be captured in jars before they get away. I keep a folder on my computer titled “Marinade” where I put the stray ideas. They have to sit there and think about what they’ve done, and when I need help I go for a walk through the folder. My first novel is in there, in all its drafts going back to the utterly dreadful high school novella, and there are reasons why it’s never seen the light of day. The next oldest file in there is from 2002 and may not actually be translatable now, but why would I let it get away? If I’m not near my computer when an idea strikes, I will use voice-to-text to stick it in my phone until I can translate it to my Marinade file. If I tried to keep it on paper, I would inevitably lose it, and there goes my Pulitzer.

Bobby Nash: Depends on your idea of massive. There are many ideas tucked away for future use. Some I will never get to, I suspect as new ideas keep working their way into my brain. One of the best things about having these ideas sitting in writer limbo is that sometimes, I realize that two of them are part of the same story and blend them together.

Nikki Nelson-Hicks: I have a backlog of ideas. All of them swarming around in my brain. I keep them in journals or post-it notes that I have stuck all around my desk top. What percentage actually gets done? I don't know, man. if I start keeping score, I'll just get constipated and never do another damn thing. I just keep trucking. If the idea is good enough, it'll last until it's time to get inked.

B. Clay Moore: I have a huge backlog of ideas, and now and then one pops back into my head to either inform a new idea or as the impetus to rework it in a new direction.

John French: I have a legal pad on my desk, with separate pages for each "project". On these pages, I write notes, story and character ideas, etc. Right now I'm about 10-15K away from finishing one with five more warming up in the bullpen waiting to get the call.

Good ol' fashioned notepad.

Ef Deal: When I started writing, I had a character arc that consumed me, and I'm not through with her yet after 35 years. In those pre-computer days, I filled blank books and spiral notebooks and steno pads. I just kept writing. I couldn't stop. She's a rich mine of stories. I've written a lot of flash pieces and other short stories in the meantime, but I keep coming back to her and that universe. I really hope she sees print one day because she's a fantastic badass. When I started this new series The Twins of Bellesfées, I found myself picturing the twins in so many steampunk / paranormal crossover situations I couldn't stop writing. The more I researched the more ideas for novels I got. 

Michael Dean Jackson: Oh, hells, yeah! I have a Word document listing a dream schedule of almost 20 projects, only half a dozen of which have been completed. I have worked on a few of them off and on, I have sketched thumbnails of potential book covers. They're all there in my mind floating around. Every once in a while I grab one and wrestle it to completion (but not as often as I'd like! The Dream Schedule is seeming more and more like a dream the longer it takes to actually get them to completion.)

My unwritten ideas sometimes seem more attractive than the one I'm working on, but they usually behave.

HC Playa: I feel like maybe I'm weird 😂. I hyperfocus on a WIP...maybe. I literally avoid going into that musing headspace of new ideas until I have a rough draft down for whatever I am working on. I don't mind at all doing edits on one while creating another.

Ernest Russell: In my story ideas folder there are 35-40 ideas, from a couple of sentences to a pitch to an outline because I really want to recall where I was going with it. The journal I carry with me has story ideas, notes on current projects, notes from panels and lectures, turn of phrase I heard/saw that I liked. No sketches though, my stick people look sick and trees look more like cotton swabs.

Jonathan Sweet: Definitely a massive backlog. I've done a better job lately of storing them -- I keep a running file on my phone so I can get them down when I think of them. (I tend to find they come up when I'm off doing something else, so my previous goal of "I'll remember them when I get back to my desk" never seemed to work.)

How big a distraction do your unwritten ideas become when you are on another project? How do you balance their demands with those of the primary stories?

Teel James Glenn: I'm pretty good at controlling the 'I've gotta do this' with "I owe this to a publisher'-- the hardest is that I need to have short story 'space' between novels' so they can circulate while the months of working on the next novel...

Ernest Russell: Jot it down. If I can't seem to let go, I'll write a synopsis or an outline to revisit. Then back into the current projects. When I finish a project, if there is nothing pressing, I'll look through the ideas and dust one off.

Starting to get out of hand, huh?

Spencer Moore: I have no “process.” But I have like, a zillion different narrative bits that I’m always fooling with in my head, like an 800-pound Rubic's Cube with about a million different sides… Seriously, I’m locked and loaded for whenever the money guys come a’knockin’.

B. Clay Moore: My last Aftershock book, Miles To Go, combined two different ideas I'd had around forever, and *also* included a scene I'd written 15 years ago for a graphic novel I never finished, based on a real experience.

Jay Requard: I outline my ideas if they have any real pull with me, so once that outline is filed away I go about what I'm working on which is usually 1-2 manuscripts and an editorial project but I'm actually reading again for. Part of the hard answer to your question that might rankle people is psychological: why would an idea bother me when it's the next thing I can do? If you have this idea in your head that there is no real rest in this *life* as an author, then you finish one project and immediately go on to the next. Having that backlog keeps the work going and the chance of making it continue.

Timothy Joe Kirk: Middling, sometimes I've got to make a note right now but can write it and go back.

Jonathan Sweet: They can be a distraction when the writing isn’t going well on my current project. They’re that bright shiny object over there … I try to balance the demands by jotting down notes as those story points come to me and then jumping back over to the current project

Bobby Nash: When something new hits, I jot down some notes to return to later. If it's an idea related to one of the projects in some form of production, I go ahead and start writing it down. Yesterday, oddly enough, I wrote a chapter for the 3rd Sheriff Myers book, which I technically haven't started writing yet. The chapter was so vivid in my mind I went ahead and wrote it. Unusual for me as I don't generally write my first draft out of order, but I knew if I didn't, I would forget it. Or, at least part of it.

Elizabeth Donald: My ideas are never a distraction. Unfortunately, sometimes they grow into fully-fledged stories with plots and twists and characters and all those lovely nuances just waiting for me to hamhandedly put them on the screen. When they reach maturity but I don’t have time to write them, it gets annoying. I was just telling a colleague last week that I have Novel A at the nine-tenths mark with a publisher waiting, Novel B plotted but not written, Collection A half-written and Collection B at the one-quarter mark, and all of these are potentially paying projects, plus a burgeoning master’s thesis. So what’s occupying my mind when I’m two minutes from falling sleep? Novel C, which no one wants and isn’t on anyone’s schedule. Stop it, Novel C! Wait your turn!

Let's be honest, what percentage of your ideas, at least those interesting enough to record for "one day," ever really make it to the forefront of your brain and get worked on as potential stories? How do you prioritize what becomes a valid new project versus what must remain in the "not yet" pile in your inventory of ideas?

Michael Dean Jackson: Honestly, I don't know how many of the dream projects will ever see the light of day. On a good day, I'd say maybe half, but realistically I'd have to say four...maybe five... and only because I have actually taken a stab at writing those

Ef Deal: My head is full of stories all the time, but they don't interfere with my writing. If I get stuck on a piece, I turn to another idea for a bit. Then I see an anthology opening, and five new ideas pop into my head, and I write them.

What do I work on next?

Roger Stegman: From 1997 to 2006, I had more ideas than I could write, so I posted them on bulletin boards. I posted at least an idea a day, and most years I posted from 50 to 400 extra ideas a year. Going through some at one time or another, one or two a month were really good. Most were drivel, but I never knew that until long after it was posted.

Jonathan Sweet: A pretty small percentage. The ideas keep coming because that’s the easy part for me. The unused story idea is the wonderful, perfect, unspoiled nugget. Sitting down and cranking out the stories are always more of a challenge. I’ve accepted that a lot of these ideas will never make it to full story form.

HC Playa: I don't really have extensive notes. I might scribble an outline, some brainstorming plot, and conflict ideas, but I tend to keep it all in my head until I build a world that is too complex. Sometimes I'll get a story started, run into a plot issue and set it aside, but that's the extent of my "idea" log.

Ernest Russell: To date, I've had three accepted and are awaiting publishing. There are perhaps half a dozen with progress made on them. Currently, I have nothing on a deadline. I've been working in collaboration on a novel, I have a sequel to a novella started, and an ongoing story a friend and I share just for the fun of it. Once the first draft of the novel is completed I have a collection I've worked on here and there, I want to concentrate on it. It's the furthest along of my different WIPs. It has the benefit that I already know there is interest in it. Beyond that, Whichever one strikes my interest. When it does, magic happens. Sometimes, nothing happens.

Bobby Nash: I don't know numbers, but there are germs of ideas that will probably never go beyond that unless another idea comes along that adds to that idea. Ideas are always flying at me, but there's more to a good story than just an idea. Sometimes, you have to wait for the right idea and character to meet.

Elizabeth Donald: I’d say maybe 30 percent of my ideas eventually come to fruition, but they may linger in the Marinade file for years. One concept went through five iterations before it morphed into the project that I sold. And really, that last part is what’s key to which ideas become a valid new project and which ideas go to the back of the line. Harlan Ellison once asked me how many stories I had sold, and I flubbed the question because Harlan made me nervous. But it occurred to me later that he didn’t ask how many ideas I’d had, or even how many stories I’d finished to my satisfaction. He asked me how many I had sold. Because when you do this for a living, that’s how you pay the rent. I’ve been told that perhaps I focus too much on the salability of a project, perhaps to the detriment of the art. That’s possibly true, but there’s also a lot of privilege to the idea that we should do art first and market second. When you have the rent paid by other means, maybe you can do art first. But when you feed your family by the written word, you need to prioritize what you can sell and keep your work out where the eyeballs can find it. So call me a craven commercialist, but buy enough of my books so I can go write Novel C, would you? That book won’t shut up.

B. Clay Moore: Just had a new book approved with a publisher, and should be outlining it while waiting on the contract, but another old idea that I'd partially developed with an artist a decade ago jumped up and bit me, and I'm now polishing that to pitch. 

If an idea is good but doesn't fly, I always keep it in the back of my busy brain.

My organization is more like "dis-"

Jay Requard: I would refer to the answer in my second question, but basically if it sticks with me for a bit I finally get to writing it down in an outline. I do have outlines I will never touch in that notebook, but I also sold three stories last year from something I wrote two years ago in it. I'm also proud to say I've completed a number of them as well.

Timothy Joe Kirk: Quite a few, sometimes I find a better way to approach the idea later.

Matt Hiebert: Three novel-length ideas in the background. If I start something I have to finish… at least a first draft. I plan to finish at least two of the novels.

Copycat, Copycat: Writers on Copying Our Inspirations

It's a common story. Writers get into writing because they're inspired by certain authors who have influenced them. And, almost always, at first they emulate them in at least style, if not substance and theme.

But let's move it from the general to specific and talk about YOU, writer.

Which author or authors were your beginning models to copy when you started? When did that copying start to shift into something that would grow into your own voice and style?

Ef Deal: My earliest influences were Bradbury and the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies. Then Tolkien. The handwavium aspect of Bradbury is the basis of all steampunk, if you think about it, so yes that fantastic element is still in my works. But mostly I was influenced by my studies in French literature, where words were chosen for their greatest effect. Poe said all elements of a story should work together to create a unified effect, and that has been my guiding mantra.

Rob Cerio: Douglas Adams, Issac Azimov, and Clive Cussler. I think my style grew into its own after I stopped worrying about making jokes that sounded like "Bad Douglas Adams" Jokes, and just let them be funny on their own.

John L. Taylor: At the beginning, I was an imitator of Ray Bradbury and John Updike to a vast extent. All my work from that period was soundly rejected as it was a pale imitation of a superior author. I had tried to write a novel manuscript, but the early draft was a meandering pile of exposition. Note I hadn't tried writing horror or New Pulp yet despite being a major fan of the genres. I began developing a voice of my own, oddly, while writing erotica under a pen name for a now defunct website (Ironically, those unpaid stories are still my most widely read at 6k or more reads). I somehow connected with an audience by writing the type of story I wanted to read. My voice in writing finally emerged while writing The Rocket Molly Syndicate for the Dieselpunk E-Pulp Showcase Vol.2 in 2013-14. My Mom was fighting ovarian cancer as I was working on it, half was written in hospital waiting rooms. I needed a release and wrote pure escapist fiction. It connected, and the anthology it appeared in moved about 775 copies across all platforms and was adapted as an audio drama for the Coffee Contrails Podcast, adding another 200 or so downloads. It is still my most successful work to date. I dug further into New Pulp, but with a strong influence from Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. My next works were The Legend of the Wild Man, a 100 line narrative poem that ran in the Mythic Circle, and The Thing in the Wexler House, an audio narration that Otis Jiry performed for me on his YouTube channel. Both got solid receptions. As I branched into poetry, more growth happened, and My current style was cemented. Eerie, dreamlike narratives with a pulp twist. Also, writing online narrations helped a lot, as I was introduced to horror voices different from what I'd read before. Variety helps a lot.

Anna Grace Carpenter: The first I remember trying to imitate was Cordwainer Smith. He had a flair for not letting story get in the way of the occasional stylistic flourish and I loved it. Later Tad Williams and Raymond E. Feist made an impact on how I used characters to best tell the "exciting" parts in ways that actually had an emotional impact, plus a particular style of world-building that has stuck with me. (I would be hard-pressed to explain this, but I know that it's there because of reading their work.)

Things started to be less copycat once I really started writing a lot. The more I was using words in storytelling regularly, the more my own style began to emerge from the way I pictured certain scenes and the dialog I heard from my characters. At which point those authors moved from a category of imitation to one of influence.

HC Playa: So there are 4 authors that spurred me into writing: Sherrilyn McQueen, J.R. Ward, Karen Marie Moning, and Patricia Potter.

All four build intricate worlds, whether it's dropping you into the romantic lives of people in 1100 AD Scotland, a hidden Vampire society, a murder investigation turned apocalyptic collision of Fae realms and human, or weaving mythology into romance and adventure.

I didn't copy any of them directly, but they all made characters breathe on the page. They weren't afraid to weave love into blood and gore and battles. One of my favorite things that I did copy was the reoccurring cast that doesn't necessarily feature the same POV from book to book.

Ernest Russell: My earliest influences were Poe, Verne, Wells, and an anthology called Tales of Time and Space. Later Lovecraft and the circle of writers from Weird Tales.

Of these early influences, there is one that influences every story. That is Jules Verne. One of the things I LOVE about Verne's stories is he did research and did his best to not only incorporate the science and technology of the story's time period but to project it forward into what might become. As such I try, even in my fantasy writing to research what I am writing and make it plausible within both the world rules for the story and what I find historically or current science and technology and translate it into the story.

Frank Fradella: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert B. Parker, and Chris Claremont. Remove any one of them and I'm not sure I'd be a writer at all. My college professor in English told me to look at Parker for dialogue, and he was right. Fitzgerald showed me how to make prose feel like poetry, but it was Claremont who taught me how to tell a story. I had been reading comics books off the spinner rack for years, but the first comic book I *remember* is Uncanny X-Men #131.

Tom Powers: A weird mix of Walter Gibson, Paul Ernst, and H.P. Lovecraft. Still echoes of them all, plus a bit of Norvell Page. Much of what I write is in the traditions of those writers' genres.

Pj Lozito: I wanted to write like Lester Dent, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Raymond Chandler and Sax Rohmer.

Teel James Glenn: Robert E Howard, Lester Dent, Peter O'Donnell, Dash Hammett.

Krystal Rollins: My inspiration: Mary Higgins Clark from my past, and my present is you,, Sean. Her work continues to inspire me in how I create my characters. Her words are printed in black ink and white paper but in my mind, it's blooming with color. I keep writing Sean because of you. (Editor's Note: Awww... Shucks. Thanks, Krystal.)

Charles Gramlich: Ray Bradbury for one

Murky Master: So Dragonlance and the anime Escaflowne, above all else, got me into writing seriously when I was about 13 years old. It took another ten years before I returned to that old dream, but I wrote part of a fantasy novel in those days that I am still surprised at its quality compared to what I wrote today.

John Morgan Neal: Stan Lee, John Broome, Gardner Fox, Bill Finger, Bob Haney, Denny O'Neil, Archie Goodwin, Len Wein, Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, Roy Thomas, Doug Moench, Michael Michael A. Baron, John Ostrander, Mike Barr, William Messner-Loebs, Bill Mantlo, Marv Wolfman, and last but opposite of least, Chuck Dixon.

Michael Dean Jackson: When I started writing (as Jack Mackenzie) I was inspired by a lot of military science fiction; Heinlein, Jack Campbell, David Weber, Lois McMaster Bujold, etc. It was with those inspirations that I wrote THE PARADIGM TRAP and THE MASK OF ETERNITY.

Do those elements of your inspirations still show up in your current work? Howso? Are they things you do consciously or have they just been internalized by the years of doing them?

Frank Fradella: Completely internalized. I took Parker's style for a spin on its own, and it felt like wearing one of those 1970 Halloween costumes that comes with the hard plastic Batman mask attached by a string. It was a conscious choice to find me in that amalgam, and that's the writer I became.

Anna Grace Carpenter: I do still love a stylish bit of storytelling. Voice, unexpected use of language and grammar (or lack thereof) to catch the reader's attention at a critical moment are some of my favorite things. And that all grew from early attempts to mimic Cordwainer Smith. And the storytelling inspiration I got from Feist and Williams is still there too. Using all the characters to tell the story whether we see their PoV or not. Allowing heroes to not always be heroic and villains to not always be villainous without diving into a grimdark grey. And allowing tragedy to occur, sometimes in very small ways that adds a bittersweetness to big triumphs.

I don't think it's deliberate, it's just how those inspirations encouraged my own voice and writing the kind of stories I like to read. Because that was what first made me want to imitate them - they wrote stories I loved. And now I write stories I love so the influence is still there, but organically after years of practicing my own storytelling.

HC Playa: At some point, I found my own writing voice, but for all my novels, these elements remain, including having two central protagonists (usually a male-female romantic pairing, but like JR Ward, I branched out the more I wrote).

Depending on the story it can almost seem like a hero and side-kick type of casting, especially as I pit them against larger-than-life dangers. (As I type this I suddenly see why my publisher says my writing is pulp 😂.) I don't lean into the romance aspect as much as those authors tended to. More like Moning's Fae Fever series, the romantic aspects take a back seat to the apocalyptic events and characters dealing with their issues.

I have read plenty of classics of multiple genres, but it would be disingenuous to say I am influenced in style by those stories.

I don't aim to write the next classic that future college students dissect to figure out what I meant when I said the sofa was an ugly flea market reject.

I write to entertain. I use elements from the stories I love reading. I love weaving in magic and the amazing, because life always needs magic.

John Morgan Neal: Yes. I'm a big ol' ape in more ways than one. But never outright. The stuff I love is in my DNA. So it has to shine through.

John L. Taylor: Many facets of my inspirations are like a reflex now. A subconscious thread. I still lean on Lovecraftian themes and first-person narrations in horror but avoid the adjective salad pulp writers often used when stories paid by the word (Lovecraft was great at taking a whole paragraph of them to say "it was an amalgam of parts that defied description, an offense to biology itself.") I guess that's the real difference between me and my inspirations: I prize concise writing. I suppose that's the last vestige of Updike left in me. But it's a great influence to retain/

Rob Cerio: I still feel like I use Cussler's "opening Gambit" formula and basic formatting of action scenes. Azimov's use of "working-class schlubs" is something that still crops up all the time in my work.

TammyJo Eckhart: I can't answer question one so question two also doesn't apply. While there are authors that I loved and still love, the idea of copying them in any way never entered my mind. I was writing stories from kindergarten onward.

Murky Master: Things I took from Dragonlance were:

• mixing cultures is both hugely interesting and creates lots of conflict, from Tanis Halfelven's internal identity drama. I'm biracial myself so it was interesting seeing someone "like me"
• Bad guys are F-ing Awesome. Raistlin made a permanent mark on my picture of wizards and magic and the lure of power magic brings. You need no further proof than to behold my profile pic, after all. Nothing makes me hahaha quite as much as my hourglass-eyed boi. Lord Soth was pure mother finding METAL as well and remains my fave Ravenloft Darklord.
• Escaflowne was a romance and an epic fantasy all at once. Later on, I would actually sit down and read a romance novel and find it totally awesome, and I like to have strong, real relationships in my books because of that anime.
• also, the anime was grand in scope, full of pathos and beautiful at times, unspeakably cruel at others (looking at you Dilandau). It helped me understand PTSD and the weight of honor as well as the power of dreams to destroy and create. Dilandau also made me like insane villains.
• the Adventures of Batman and Robin cartoon with Bruce Tim as the art director also made me love art deco and Pulp sentiments. The episode featuring "The Grey Ghost" and Brendan Frasers The Mummy sealed my fate. Now I can't help but have all cap titled like DESTROYERS FROM WALMARTS BEYOND and COURT OF THE GLISTENING LUNCH LADIES and such.

Chuck Dixon: I read so much before I started writing for a living that I have no idea who's work I've intuited over the years.

Michael Dean Jackson: However, around the time I was writing my books I discovered the television series SHARPE on the History Channel. I loved every episode and I loved Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe. So I figured I would try the novels by Bernard Cornwell and I loved them even more. The books were, I found, immensely better than the show.

And it was those novels and the character of Sharpe who fired up my imagination and helped me come up with my own, military SF version, a character called Jefferson Odett.

I have only written two Jefferson Odett books, DEBT'S PLEDGE and DEBT'S STAND, but I do have a third one that I may eventually get to. Nevertheless, Jefferson Odett is more than a little inspired by Richard Sharpe, in the same way that Horatio Hornblower, C.S. Forrester's seafaring adventure hero, inspired Bernard Cornwell's character.

I am under no illusion that my novels have anywhere near the quality of Cornwell's or Forrester's, but the inspiration is there.