I used to find that one of the most frustrating things about creativity was that I would think of something brilliant, and then somehow, mysteriously I’d forget it. What made it doubly annoying is the fact that I have a good memory – tending towards storing away useless information such as my family’s telephone number in England 40 years ago, every single registration plate I have had on my multitudes of cars and other such oddities to be sure, but a good memory nevertheless.

Note to those that have noticed, I am crap with faces and names however. But things such as the way to a location, where important things like cream cheese are in Woolworths or which car(s) appeared in which episodes(s) of Top Gear are a snap.

From one who makes a living out being creative by writing lots of words and making the occasional film and radio show, it is therefore relatively important that I remember these flashes of brilliance when they occur as more often they are not, they are a theme for an article, a screenplay idea for a short film or the plot of a short story. Even my humble attempts at painting and music as mentioned last week can be sources of inspiration – a melody line or colour combination for example.

Being a so called geek, and an admitted gadget freak, I have tried everything to try and record these impulses my brain cell(s) occasionally pump out.

I have tried to carry little mini tape dictation recorders, just about every hand held ever invented from an original Tandy PC-1 to a Palm V, a Casio equivalent then a Casio Cassiopeia. For a short time I used a nifty little beast called a “Race Pen” – god knows why – that was effectively a pocket computer with a mini QWERTY keyboard and Microsoft Works in ROM and about 48K RAM. And it sort of worked until one day it got wet. And of course iPacs and other Windows CE type animals.
I still have and use a Tandy Model 100, which is to this day one of the cleverest portables ever made running for literally years on 2 “AA” batteries, sporting a full size, and beautiful to use keyboard, an 8 line LCD screen and having word processing, address book, scheduler and comms program in ROM. 25 years after its launch, admirers on aircraft trips still ask me where they can buy one as I am typing away long after their feeble 3 hour laptops have failed. (I remember one time on a US trip a suit was bitching and moaning about his Compaq dying about an hour after take off, He was not amused when offered him some of my spare batteries. Smartarse-ish I know, but I couldn’t resist.

In a sense, the situation reminds me of the late, great Lotus 1-2-3. Its predecessor and the original, VisiCalc, ran in 48KB RAM (no not MB, KB!) and had 32KB available to put data into – that was 256 rows by 64 columns. Lotus needed a 640K system just to run! The point being, why is all this power needed as in the current breed of laptops, when they are mainly used by executives typing notes, reading web pages and sending emails plus the occasional spreadsheet).

But I digress, sort of.

My latest gadget was a Sony digital voice storage device that theoretically allowed me to not only take verbal notes, but let me catalogue them in different folders as well as interacting with voice recognition software. I think I used it once to record an interview while doing a brief stint on Police Rounds for the local newspaper.

Then I discovered Microsoft One Note; a brilliant piece of software emulating in an electronic way the humble foolscap pad and allowing cross referencing, indexing and interaction with other Office applications and the ‘net. The trouble is it’s a little difficult to find the excitement to do a One Note session at 3am when it is freezing cold and pouring with rain. Or when driving the car.

Then in a moment when I was in a position that I could remember to note down a Bright Idea, I had a Bright Idea. I bought three notebooks and three pencils with erasers in the tip; one sits on the bedside table, one in the centre console of my car and one on my desk.

Each Bright Idea is dated and time stamped, simply written down, and then at convenient times, transferred to One Note for cataloguing and later refinement. Sections include “Ideas for novels”, “Short story ideas”, “Story ideas for Australasian Camcorder” and so on. I also scan interesting articles from magazine/newspapers and drop them in there, excerpts from websites, URLs and so on. So far, by far the most used notebook has been the one beside the bed followed by the car.

Simple hey? Sometimes the basics are the best.