This morning, I got up and created a new series. It’s been something that’s been rattling around in my head for a week or so and I tend to follow the wisdom, “if it sticks with you, it’s probably worth paying attention to.”

However, I hadn’t done anything with it because I was still rolling it around in my head and it hadn’t reached a point where I had a firm idea of the outline or the characters, just a vague idea that I thought sounded good.

All that changed this morning though and I finally pulled the trigger. So here’s why.

Way back when, I used to just write whatever I wanted to write. I’d come up with a ton of story ideas and then, when I needed one to work on, invariably it would be the most recent that I’d imagined because, of course, that was most recently on my mind. Dozens of books would go by the wayside because they weren’t the most fresh thing in my head. I have no idea how many I’ve just forgotten about entirely because I never wrote any of it down.

Then, back at the beginning of 2019, I decided that I had to change that. I went through all of the stories that I’d had, all of the things in my head and all of the Scrivener documents that I’d created, where I’d described plots and characters, etc. and I put them on a spreadsheet, from oldest to newest and declared that was the order that I was going to write them in.

It was actually kind of shocking how many ideas I had just sitting there gathering dust. I don’t remember the actual numbers at the time, but just going by the list today, I am about to start on book 20 since I put the list together and the new series, that clocks in at books 67-69. If I write 6 books a year, which has been my average up until this year, it’ll take me 8 years to get to that series.

That’s kind of insane.

In there, I have a 12-book “quadrology of trilogies” series that I’m starting on book 7 this month. I’ll finish up the series in 2023. I have an ongoing series that I’m expecting to run 13 books. I’ve written the first 3. I’ve got a third series on superheroes, relating to something I’ve been trying to write, and failing, since about 2014, and that, I’m figuring, will run 9-12 books. I also have 8 stand-alone trilogies already planned and that’s going to grow. There are also two stand-alone books that I came up with, honestly, since I started to write this post. That’s book #70. There’s just never an end.

For the writers out there who say “I don’t know what to write”, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe you’re not trying hard enough. There are ideas absolutely everywhere. Everything you watch, everything you read, everything that you experience, there are ideas there. You just have to gather them together and let them intermingle until you come up with something you want to write. It’s why, years and years back, I started keeping a list of every idea that I came up with. It’s just a Word document with dates and whatever ideas I throw in there. There are tens of thousands of them in there by now. Every now and then, I’ll just read through the list and see what gels and that becomes a new series of books. I used to do it once or twice a year, but of late, I haven’t had to because they’ve just been coming fully formed. I’ll never reach the end of my book ideas. There are just too many.

Not one person who has ever implemented that concept, at least that I’m aware of, has run out of things to write. It just spawns creativity to no end. If you’re having problems, give it a shot. Don’t hold back. Any idea, no matter how small, should go in there. It might lead to something down the road.

Anyhow, I was talking about this series. It started off as an idea of sorts, I have that happen a lot, where I was thinking about a lot of the books I’ve been writing lately where everyone has FTL and it’s a lot of zap-zap space action fights. What if I did a space epic with no faster-than-light travel? There’s a colony ship headed across the stars and, mid-way to their destination, something happened and they couldn’t stop and they couldn’t continue on?

That wound up in my head for a while until one night, I had a dream where the whole thing just came to me, fully formed as a series. I knew where it was starting and I knew where it was ending up and everything in between. It was still in my head when I woke up and I rushed out to get it all down on “paper” before I forgot. Now, I really want to get working on it, even though I know that by the time I do, it’ll be 8 years from now. There are tons of other stories that need to come first, all of which I am still interested in writing. That gives me 8 years to roll it around in my head, come up with twists and turns and characters (currently I only have the main 2) and take lots of notes. By the time I actually get to the writing, I’ll have the overwhelming majority of it plotted and ready to plunge into.

So why did I bring this up at all? Because one of the biggest problems that I see prospective authors having, even authors that are published and successful, is the complaint that they don’t know what to write. They just sit there and stare at a blank screen and are completely lost. I never have that problem. I have more stories than I will ever have time to write them. I’ve forgotten more stories than I will ever write in my lifetime. It’s all in how you structure your creative process. You can train your brain to be creative on command but it takes work and once you figure out how to do it, you’ll never be at a loss for ideas again.

Good luck.