Managing ideas that turn up unannounced

I don't know about other artists and writers, but I find that I'm most likely to get ideas for my creative projects when I'm least able to act on them. You say to yourself, "I'll write it down later" but more often that not, you'll either forget about it completely or have that frustrating feeling of knowing you had a good idea but now it's gone.

One of the most common times for me to get ideas is at around 2 or 3 in the morning, when I'm in that foggy area between sleeping and waking. I do try to keep some sticky notes and a pen next to my bed for when I have these midnight ideas, or failing that, I can write something in the notes app on my phone. This doesn't always help, though; my sleepy brain is not good at communicating with my awake brain, and more often than not, the incoherent ravings I leave for myself are beyond my ability to decipher. Below is an example of an actual "idea" I found one morning when I woke up (and no, I still don't know what it means several months later). That being said, I have ended up with some truly bizarre notes that I was actually able to figure out the meaning of, so it's still worth a try.

So, there's probably not a lot I can do about the midnight ideas, but I also often get ideas during the day when I'm doing academic work, like marking assignments or revising my thesis (which I should be doing right now SHUT UP DON'T JUDGE ME), or even sometimes when I'm working on a different creative project. For those random ideas, I carry a pocket-sized notepad when I'm away from my computer, and for when I am at my desk, I have a Word document set up for getting the ideas down as fast as possible. It's important to note that these documents are not designed for ideas that are eloquently written or painstakingly crafted into intelligent prose. No, they are for a quick and ugly dump of whatever ideas are rattling around in my brain so I can get them out of my head and move on with whatever I'm supposed to be doing. One of my friends in my writing course many years ago coined the term "brain poo" to describe this process of essentially crapping out ideas at speed, and I liked it so much I still use it today.

The benefit of this process is that you don't have to worry about if the ideas is good or not, or try to figure out how to express it. That's Future You's problem. Once you get the bones of the idea down on paper (or on a blank Word doc), that niggling fear of "what if I forget the idea?" is gone. Later on when you have time, you can open that document and see if the idea is workable (whether it be for a new project or for something you're currently working on). If it is, you can sit down and start expanding on it. If it's not, you can just bin it.

Unfortunately it doesn't help with that itch to just write the story, but it does at least ensure you have some fuel to work with next time you do have the chance to sit down in front of your WIP.