This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast. I hope you

enjoyed this week's episode six ways to find your best ideas before you start

writing.

For writers, ideas are the primal matter. No ideas, no stories.

But sometimes ideas are like butterflies.

They flit in, they flit out. If we aren't paying

attention, sometimes we don't even recognize that they've been there. Even when

we do stop short in awe of their beauty,

we risk damaging them if we get too excited

and try to capture them too quickly or too forcefully.

Not all ideas are this fragile, of course, there are different kinds of ideas.

There are solid logical left brain ideas.

These are the ones we feel in control of. We come up with them, we guide them, we get to decide whether our

protagonists take Road A or Road B because we are the ones who have also decided what's going to be at the end of those roads.

But other ideas, the butterfly ideas, are more ephemeral, spontaneous, right-brain ideas.

These are the inspired ideas, the ones gifted to us from beyond our own conscious understanding.

These are the ideas that happen when our subconscious takes over.

The story writes us rather than us writing the story. Although both types of ideas are crucial to

the process of wrangling a story into cohesion and resonance, I'd argue the right brain ideas are really the true substance.

Inspiration, after all, is every writer's absent.

But inspiration cannot be forced.

Indeed, inspiration can't even really be caught.

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