Insert a snort of laughter here.
Ideas are the easy part. My God, I can't do anything without ideas jumping into my brain.
Introduce a throwaway secondary character? Ideas come to make him a hero in a later book.
Watch a baseball game? Get multiple ideas.
Overhear part of a conversation? More ideas.
Meme on Facebook? Ideas!
You get the picture. I have notebooks and file drawers full of ideas. More than I could write in twenty lifetimes.
Not all ideas are created equal. Some of them don't have enough substance to them to become full-fledged stories, not even a short story. Others are intriguing, but I don't love them enough to spend months and months writing them. And the biggest problem, of course, is finding time to write the ones I do love.
So yeah, ideas are literally the easiest part of writing. The hard part? It's actually writing. It's hammering out the details, filling the plot holes, coming up with ways to get from point A to point Z. It's discovering what you think will work leads to logic problems. Or that your characters absolutely refuse to go along with the idea. I've blogged before about how my hero and heroine will stop talking to me if I write something they don't like. When I'm spinning my wheels, I try to figure out where I made my mistake.
And then all the words back to that point get cut.
Yeah.
You do not want to see the file labeled "Old Stuff" on my computer. Each book has one of those and it's where the stuff I wrote that didn't work goes to live. I don't just delete anything because maybe I can use it. Some day.
