Where do you perform your best "writing thinking"?

[reiver33]

I once lay awake into the not-so-small hours, an idea for a short story churning away in my head, until I had it all 'done and dusted'. Well, that's the abiding sense of it that remains, as the setting, dialogue, indeed all detail were gone when I awoke later.

 

[WatermelonPink]

Honestly just about anywhere. Sometimes I'll come up with stuff or think about stuff while in the middle of something but it's usually when I'm just listening to music and it hypes me up for a specific type of scene I would like to write.

 

[Alex The G and T]

Doing mindless labor. And there's plenty of that around the Alex homestead; digging in the garden, making firewood, clearing brush.

When the body is running on autopilot; the mind runs free.

Not a good time for jotting down and saving ideas, though.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Usually get my best ideas anywhere I’m unable to record them—like driving or sleeping, and when I finally do get a chance to write them down most of the time I’ve lost them.

I have a friend, a writer who has worked professionally as a playwright. She has whole scenes suddenly play out in her head as she drives and has to pull over to get them down before they vanish.

I once had a two page comic strip that I had abandoned months before (because I didn't know what was going to happen after the second panel and then totally forgotten) just drop, fully-formed, into my head as I was walking down the stairs. Hadn't thought of it for months but my subconscious had been slogging away at it all that time and finally came up with something worth bothering my conscious self with. It was a funny gag too.

Brains is weird things.

Usually for me it's doodling and doodling and doodling - what is this character doing? Who IS this character? What's going on in these panels? The strip I'm doing at the moment I just kept drawing panels of a couple of my regular guys dealing with some sort of emergency in their spaceship and shouting technobabbale at each other till the ship's captain turned up in panel seven and delivered the punchline I had been looking for. (That was in the rough scribbled doodles. In the finished pencils the punchline has been condensed from her telling us what had happened to cause the emergency - to me drawing it. Show not tell. And it got changed and simplified anyway, so the captain got eliminated. It's a hard, thankless task being an imaginary person.)