I may have written about this before. Get ten years of nearly weekly blogs under your belt and it can be a bit of a blur… but heck, anything important enough to write about once can arguably bear repeating. So let’s talk about hoarding. Oh, not the kind where you’ve got mummified cats in the corners of your living room because you haven’t cleaned it in years. There’s not really much of an upside there. But hoarding imagination is another matter, and what I mean by that is this — when you’re engaged in creative endeavors, never throw an idea away. Now if you’re jotting all those ideas down in physical media I suppose you could eventually become swamped in decaying notebooks and journals, but the advent of electronic storage means that doesn’t have to happen. Hell, you could even just store it all in your head, but personally speaking I prefer to dedicate what memory space I have there to more current needs. See, it’s entirely possible that a given creative idea is too stupid to ever see the light of day in any form… but so what? Doesn’t hurt anything to keep it around, and there’s the possibility that somewhere down the line as you ransack the dusty halls of your notes and/or brain, you might pick it up and find out that it’s just what you needed. Yesterday’s trash could be tomorrow’s inspiration. For example, Dawn and I are both fans of the D&D vodcast Critical Role (though lately we’ve been playing catch-up on episodes rather than watching as they air). We’ve also both been Gamemasters in our time, so it was with rueful laughter that we watched one episode where Dungeon Master Matt Mercer had to basically chuck an encounter he’d prepared as the players managed to snag an insta-win through a clever spell use and a successful slim-chance die roll. I’ve been on both sides of this phenomenon and there’s an undeniable exhilaration as a player when you successfully go “off script” and subvert the carefully laid plans of your Gamemaster. If you happen to be that Gamemaster, you have to learn to adjust, and yeah, maybe that dungeon you spent all weekend working out the details of isn’t going to happen because your players took a look at the dank hole in the ground and decided they’d rather head onwards to the next Inn. One of my GMs literally chucked a thick binder over his shoulder defeatedly when we did just that. But see, don’t throw all that work away just because it didn’t fit into the current session! Instead, I’d keep that binder handy and then maybe sometime in the future my players would want to stick their noses into some dungeon that I *didn’t* prepare for… only hah! Here happens to be this ready-made dungeon I can haul out and use, with some tweaks here and there to suit the current circumstances. So same thing with writing. Maybe you find an idea or character or event doesn’t fit into your story after all, even though you love it dearly and perhaps even spent a lot of work researching it and fleshing out details. You’ve got to cut it. But keep it around, right? It might be just the piece of the puzzle you need at some point. A sequel perhaps. Or even a different tale entirely. Hoard that imagination and the trash has every possibility of becoming treasure.