The Spark File

This is a pretty shameless reworking of a piece of the same name by Steven Johnson, that he wrote for Medium back in 2012. The original piece is here.

A spark file is a place to jot down ideas; often the more fleeting the better - these are the sparks of something that might grow in the future; a good title, a nice phrase, a “what if?” etc.

I know people who deliberately don’t write down ideas, on the basis that anything good or worthwhile will stick in the brain, and whatever the brain filters out wasn’t any good to begin with. I don’t buy this, because the brain does not have infinite capacity, and it doesn’t reliably remember that which is useful, or none of us would ever lose our keys.

Steven Johnson uses one large, evolving document as his spark file (or he did back in 2012). Over the years, I have moved from various notebooks through various bits of software, always trying to gather everything up and move it with me. A lot of the stuff in there is probably dead, and some of it was just useful in passing (I had a note simply titled “Liberty Flights?” for several years before I used it as the name of a key company in the second series of Aldrich Kemp), but a lot of it feels like fragments waiting to connect to other fragments. And when those connections happen, whole stories can suddenly spring into being. The ongoing Saltmarsh storyline on the Pleasant Green blog is one of these, as was the sci-fi podcast we’re currently polishing up for Audible, and several TV shows that I’ve sold over the past few years.