One of the challenges in building a product with a small team over a long period is keeping track of interesting ideas that get parked or deferred due to lack of time and resources.
Keeping track is not just about making a list for future reference. It is about using them as a trigger or a fork for fresh ideas when there is a need.
I found the book on 'Second Brain' by Tiago Forte somewhat intriguing though I have not yet managed to put those suggestions and the broad approach to work.
What has helped me through Onemyle is maintaining a backlog of stories/tips/ideas in the form of 'mails-to-myself' - sometimes cryptic and sometimes more elaborate.
Recently I happened to revisit an interview of AR Rahman - the music composer where he talks about 'cataloging' his work during his free time so that they act as fresh trigger points for the future.
I had read something similar in an interview of writer Salman Rushdie long back..
Do you save parts from your drafts that you don’t use, and do they come back in your fiction?
Yes, in this novel there was a much older woman in the lower east side of Manhattan. She was a bag lady who stumbled into the story. She had more interesting stories than others and I wrote about her quite a lot. She had a back-story. But I felt she was in the wrong book, so her character had to go.
Then there was a time I wrote a short story which I didn’t think was successful in doing what I wanted it to do, so I put it away in a folder and forgot about it. Many years later, when I started writing Haroun, I remembered that story, which has the battle between Guppees and Chupwalas. I had read the travels of Ibn Battuta, and there were a couple of missing elements; he had stumbled upon a place where this battle takes place and the story was about that. I didn’t like what I had written then. It sounded precious. But many years later, it turned out to be just what I needed as the structure for Haroun.
More than just one light-bulb moment leading to a magical product - very often, it seems a serious of incremental ideas (based on work done in the past) and new iterations that eventually end up creating some magic.
Comments