A Good Idea Can Wait

I remember watching Neil Gaiman's MasterClass and listening to him talk about how he came up with the idea for The Graveyard Book. He started working on it, realized he wasn't a good enough writer to do what he had in mind, and put it away. He kept coming back to it over the years, and the part I liked was his explanation of why he eventually wrote it. In a 2008 interview with Publishers Weekly, he put it this way: “I'm not going to be any better a writer so I may as well go ahead and write it.” There was something reassuring about that. He'd given himself time to get better, but he still had to sit down and write the book without knowing whether he'd become the writer he thought it needed.

A lot of my ideas get worked out in conversations with ChatGPT before I decide whether I'm going to do anything with them. I'll have a thought about a feature, a process, or something I could build, and start talking through it. Usually, there's enough there to be interesting, but I haven't worked out what the whole thing would involve. I'll ask questions, brainstorm, have it poke holes in what I'm proposing, and sometimes take the idea to a different model to have another conversation about it. By the time I've done that, I generally have a better idea of what I'm asking for, including the parts that weren't in the original thought because the original thought was conveniently skipping over them.

Eventually, I get to the point where I have to decide whether I want to pursue it right now. That's where the amount of work starts to matter a little more than how interesting the idea sounds. I can imagine a feature being useful and still have trouble justifying everything I'd need to do to get it working. Then there's whatever comes afterward, because if I build the thing, I'm probably also the person who gets to figure out why it stopped working. When I'm considering a way to make a process easier, I have to include the possibility that I'll end up with a second process to take care of the first one. It can be a perfectly reasonable project and still be more than I want to take on.

I've already done a version of this with the website you're reading. Before I got it running again, I could turn the idea of a personal website into discussions about architecture, frameworks, redesigns, authentication, analytics, and deployment. There was always another thing to work out before it felt ready. When I finally built it again, what I wanted was much simpler: somewhere to write about what I was doing and thinking about. Cloudflare Pages turned out to be easier than I expected, and talking through the work with AI helped me get it moving. I'd spent plenty of time considering what a website could become when I mostly wanted a place to put posts like this one.

That's part of why I like having Brainwav. If I talk through an idea and decide I'm not going to pursue it, I have somewhere to put it. Brainwav is my personal place for notes, thoughts, and things I want to be able to find again, so an idea doesn't have to become an active project just to stay around. I can save what I've worked out and move on to something else. Maybe I'll come back with a better understanding of how to do it, or maybe whatever made it seem useful will have changed by then. Either way, I don't need to settle its entire future at the end of a ChatGPT conversation.

I think it would also help to leave myself a little more context about why I put something away. Finding an interesting idea later is useful, but finding the idea along with the part I couldn't make sense of would save me some repetition. If I thought it would take too much work for what I'd get out of it, I'd want that in the note. If I was missing some knowledge or waiting on something else, I'd want to know that too. Otherwise, I can see myself getting interested all over again and working my way back to the same problem, which would be a fairly elaborate way of rereading my own notes.

I keep coming back to the Gaiman story because he eventually did write the book. I like the room it leaves for both decisions: putting something away when it isn't coming together and returning to it without expecting to feel completely ready. My ideas are usually on a considerably smaller scale, but that part feels familiar. For now, I'm comfortable talking something through, deciding I've gone far enough with it, and saving it in Brainwav. If I come back to it later, I'll have somewhere to start. In the meantime, I have the website running and a place to write about whatever I end up doing next.