Something Louise Doughty said at the Perth Writers Festival earlier this year has really stuck with me, and still disturbs me a little bit. I hope time hasn’t altered my memory of what she actually said, but it was definitely something along the lines of being a writer who doesn’t collect her ideas on random bits of paper. I thought we all did!

As I remember it, Doughty said that she’s not one of those writers who keeps a journal with lots of ideas and snippets of fiction. She doesn’t write anything down unless she’s actually working on a novel. And the reason, if I remember rightly, is because she thinks that if she writes it down first, the freshness is lost and the idea is never the same again. On top of that, she believes she never really loses or forgets her good ideas.

It’s an interesting point of view but I’d be absolutely paranoid about losing my best ideas. I know already that I lose ideas – things I think of in the shower or lying in bed that I’m unable to write down at the time – although I don’t know for sure if they’re actually good ideas. But they could be, and I certainly do use ideas that I’ve written in odd places later on. Sometimes the very act of writing them down is enough that I then remember them when it’s relevant to what I’m writing, but without keeping notes – in a journal, in my diary or a sticky note – I can’t believe that everything would still be present in my brain.

Having said that, I am often surprised about the odd kinds of details and ideas that jump into my mind just when I need them, while I’m writing. A snippet of conversation I overhead years ago, or the kind of shirt that someone wore on a TV show, or whatever else I need to fill a gap in a story I’m writing, all seem to appear with fantastic timing. I’m getting myself tangled up now – perhaps Louise Doughty really has a point. Yet I’m not confident enough about that to stop jotting down ideas when I’m able to. What about you?