How do you organized and develop story ideas that you want to develop, but don't mesh well together in the same book?
It's a bit of a different process for everyone, but personally, I sort them into various categories. I have one main project, that's going to be my focus and take up the majority of my time, no matter how many cool ideas I have. That way I'll actually finish things instead of fluffing off and writing a chapter or two of twenty ideas. Then I have 1-3 side projects that each get their own document. I'll be doing brainstorming, outlining, maybe do a bit of writing on these when the mood hits me while drafting my main. That way by the time I finish my main, I have all these well fleshed-out ideas ready to pick from, and they can also just provide a break or take advantage of my inspiration. Finally, I have all the rest together in one document. This is basically my 'flash of inspiration' document, where I drop all my cool shiny new ideas. If I'm really hyped about a new idea, I'll jot down all my thoughts on it as they come, and these have the potential to be upgraded to side projects if they really hold my attention. Once an idea is down on paper, it stops nagging at me as much and I know I'll always have a chance to come back to it later.
I sort them by genre, then by type, then a-z. I outline or summarize each as I work, and keep a doc in each folder for scraps and ideas. I don't as a rule keep character profiles, but I do have docs that list each character and in the case of secondary and minor characters there's other info as well. It's a basic system, but thus far it has worked for me. Edit I am no longer pursuing any new ideas. I don't even keep records of those I come up with. I decided that a novella, two standalone novels, a mystery quartet, and two high fantasy sagas were enough work for my lifetime. I have other ideas, but I just leave them to rot.
I lay them to rest in a Google Doc. I'm certainly not organized about it, though. The sooner the ideas get out of my head, the sooner my consciousness (overt and sub) can get back to fixing all of the problems with the story at hand. I don't have much organic processing power or storage, so I work to keep things tidy up there in noggin town.
I don't. I get an idea of a story and just start writing it and it unfolds for itself. Think about it when I'm not writing and more gets added to it. It's just having fun and being creative. I Think writers block comes from over thinking and trying to contrive something.
They don't necessarily have to mesh, really. If they work individually as short stories, you can always throw them into a collection. They don't have to connect.
I think it is cause of my autism, but I have so many different ideas that wouldn't mesh well together, and idk how to organize then properly.
I like what Idiosyncratic said. I used to have notebooks/documents/random pages with ideas, there wasn't a rhyme or reason to it but when I looked through them (and it could be anything - a plot point, an image, a particular font even) sometimes a few bits would jump out at me as belonging together, and they would sort of grow from there into a larger piece with its own document/notebook. But I think not being too organised helped keep things sort of fresh and organic. (Nowadays my creativity is a little stagnant so I've only got one novel on the brain, but that's a different story.)
