Too Many Ideas. Where To Start?

The last few days I've been thinking that I want to re-arrange a short story I wrote about 2 months ago and try to make it into at least a novella, if not a full-length, and have come up with many new ideas for it. Then today I suddenly got a totally different idea and wrote the opening pages of a story that is completely un-related and that I think is some of my best writing so far. To add to all that, I recently took a trip to Maui with some extended family members and have plenty of stories and funny stuff to put into a non-fiction piece.

All of this has brought up some options that I didn't plan on. I could:

*Put everything aside and continue with the piece that suddenly struck me today.

*Continue with the re-write of the first story.

*Wait on all that and focus on the non-fiction piece. I took all kinds of notes while on the trip so, really, it isn't going anywhere. Neither are the other two, for that matter.

My question for the group here is, what do you do when you have more ideas than you know what to do with? Work on each one here and there, whenever you're inspired? Jot some ideas down but continue with whatever you were working on already? None of the above?

If you don't write the ideas down, will you remember it with clarity...I'd prioritize a little bit...get down to what matters, if you are writing a non-fiction to make some money and there is a deadline,then that comes first...otherwise, I'd focus on one story at a time, and hit the others up if you draw a blank. Sometimes, one story will end up lending itself to another.

"Then today I suddenly got a totally different idea and wrote the opening pages of a story that is completely un-related and that I think is some of my best writing so far."

It is funny that you should say this because this false perception has a tendency to cloud your mind when you are bored with the material you are currently writing (in this case, your book I presume). This is just the way I thought when I diverted from writing my book in progress for a time and wrote abstract short story segments. After consummating them I was ready to believe that they were the greatest writings I had ever produced, but upon returning to them a week later they were far from incorrigible, grammatically and story-wise. Perhaps your new writing is stylistically better than your old, I'm not insinuating it isn't... but I believe this is a short-lived feeling many writers tend to inherit when they are bored with their mainstream efforts.

The general maxim for this type of situation is... stick to one task until its finished. No matter how good, mediocre or "plain" it is, it must be finished. If you begin sporadically starting and stopping, it shows that you aren't directed or comitted to completing your work. But heck, that applies to anything..

Congrats on having many ideas at the same time--been my experience that I personally go through times where I have nothing to write about, not even a shopping list, and then I have 20 ideas for The Great Novel at once. Not that they've ever come to fruition, but... It never rains, but it pours, as someone once said.

I'll answer your question with a question of my own: why worry about just one of them? There is no law--written or otherwise--that states a writer must focus on a single piece at a time. You're free to work on all of them at once; no need to be "monogamous" with your writing (for lack of a better term...)

I know that a lot of writers (amatuer/pro/otherwise) rather concentrate on only one thing, and that's fine--if you'd rather do that, by all means, do so. If you're more of the "scheduled" kind of writer, where you need your writing life to be regulated and ordered, then you should just pick one and stick with it until it's done. (Of course, "done" could be anything from first draft to seeing it in hard copy at the store--that's your choice). My suggestion in that instance is to pick the very first one that you think you should work on, the one that springs to mind before you let yourself think about it at all and talk yourself into doing something else.

If you don't feel the need to have things organized though--or even if you do and you just want to try something different--work on all of them at the same time. Write a little on each one as ideas come to you, ignoring the others for that moment and going back to them when the mood hits you. You may find them playing off of each other--all of a sudden, your non-fiction from Maui might turn into a catalyst in your short-story-turned-novel/la. Your moment of inspiration could put your non-fiction work into a whole different light, and inspire you with scenes that don't fit well anywhere right now but could be the perfect starting point for yet another article/story/book.

(I don't want to sound like I'm knocking the "scheduled" mentality at all if that's how the words are coming out. My apologies as necessary.)

If it isn't apparent, I generally tend towards working on multiple pieces simultaneously, switching back and forth as the moods strike me. I'm all for pushing myself to get past a bit of writers block now and then and forcing a little discipline on myself, but there's no way I can give, say a romance story the attention it deserves if I just got this brilliant idea for a completely unrelated story involving ghosts and demons. So I work on the demons for a bit, then when I run out of ideas there I go back to the romance and let the kinks in the ghost story work themselves out subconsciously.

Then again, this may be why I've only completed a handful of short stories and a first draft of a novel that I can't bring myself to revise...:)

Good luck with your ideas though.

Yeah, too much is better than too little.

Can't agree with Adol's prescription. It's helpful to apply a certain professionalism to writing, but ultimately the pieces of writing you do for art's sake aren't jobs like cleaning the house or fixing a bicycle puncture that can just be whipped through. Aside from everything else, the process of writing, while it can also be hard, can be much more pleasurable than regular hum-drum labour, and ending a given piece can be a sort of loss. There are infinite reasons to take breaks and the one find most compelling is that it lets the world back in and that's where I get ideas in the first place - that and fairly undisciplined thinking and daydreaming.

The great thing about having a lot of ideas and switching between them is that you stay productive and your mind has space to go on working invisibly on the things you think you're leaving alone. The bad thing is not knowing which thing to work on at any given moment. This is going to vary from person to person, but I find the answer often comes in periods of revery, staring out the window/at the wall etc. I'll start having thoughts about a particular piece of work and then I can get started.