mary g. on Story Club with George Saunders

If i have an idea (I mean a new idea--like a germ for a story), I have to use it right then. If I write it down for later, it's lost to me. Those notes I keep on my phone or in my notebook--they're fun to look back on, but generally useless (to me). Walter Mosley wrote about this, and his words sum up my experience exactly: "You write down a few sentences in your journal and sigh. This exhalation is not exhaustion but anticipation at the prospect of a wonderful tale exposing a notion that you still only partly understand. A day goes by. Another passes. At the end of the next week you find yourself in the same chair, at the same hour when you wrote about the homeless man previously. You open the journal to see what you’d written. You remember everything perfectly, but the life has somehow drained out of it. The words have no art to them; you no longer remember the smell. The idea seems weak, it has dissipated, like smoke. This is the first important lesson that the writer must learn. Writing a novel is gathering smoke. It’s an excursion into the ether of ideas. There’s no time to waste. You must work with that idea as well as you can, jotting down notes and dialogue."