What If All Those Scraps of Paper Are Actually One Story?

The problem may not be that you have too many ideas. It may be that you haven’t recognized what’s connecting them.

I have always had too many ideas.

For a long time, I thought that was a problem I needed to fix. Ideas for gardening books. Ideas for art projects. Notes scattered everywhere, on napkins, in margins, in the middle of the night. I could see possibilities everywhere, but I couldn’t figure out how they belonged together.

Perhaps you know that feeling. I understand it because I lived there for a long time. I had already written gardening books, with ideas for several more sitting unfinished. I was running a business built on all of it, and somewhere underneath, a whole other life was quietly asking for my attention.

For years, I thought the answer was choosing. Pick the safe one. The one I already knew how to do.

Then a friend asked me something simple. Why don’t you write fiction?

I didn’t have a good answer. So I sat with it instead of dismissing it, and something shifted that I didn’t expect. The women I’d been writing about for my last container gardening book wouldn’t leave me alone. I realized I already knew them. I’d been writing about people the whole time, just calling it something else.

That wasn’t a new idea arriving. It was an old one, finally showing its face.

But the breakthrough was not that I finally chose fiction and left everything else behind. It was then that I began to recognize the thread running through it all.

My gardening work was never only about plants in pots. It was about helping people notice what was missing in their lives and become more confident in their own observations.

My fiction does not tell women what lesson they should take from a character. It lets them sit with Raven, Quinn, Riley, Val, and Skylar long enough to recognize something in themselves.

My nonfiction doesn’t try to hand readers an answer. It begins with an experience, a question, or a moment that might help them discover their own.

That is not a collection of unrelated interests. It is one way of seeing the world, expressed through different forms.

Once I understood that, I didn’t have fewer ideas. I had a way to understand why they kept coming.

Perhaps the same thing is true for you.

Maybe the problem is not that you have collected too many stories. Maybe you have assumed they are unrelated.

What if they’re not?

If we were sitting together, I probably would not begin by asking, “What do you want to write?”

That question can be useful, but it often comes too soon. It asks you to name the finished shape before you have had a chance to notice what has been forming underneath it.

I would ask different questions.

What have you carried with you for years?

What do you keep coming back to, even after you’ve tried to set it aside?

Which stories refuse to leave you alone?

Those questions are not meant to produce a list of possible topics. They are meant to reveal patterns.

A client told me she’s been keeping journals for thirty years, alongside sketchbooks of women she’s painted, half-finished, put away, taken out again. On the surface, those look like two separate hobbies she never took seriously.

But look closer, and there’s one question underneath both of them:

What does it look like when something forgotten is demanding attention again?

In this case, that question doesn’t live in the journals. It doesn’t live in the sketchbooks either.

It lives in her. It’s been directing her attention for thirty years, and she never noticed, because she was standing inside it the whole time.

That’s not a coincidence waiting to be pointed out. It’s a thread. And once she sees it, she doesn’t have several unrelated interests anymore. She has one story that’s been finding different doors into the world.

Most of us are too close to our own lives to recognize the patterns that seem obvious to someone looking in. We remember the abandoned projects, the changed directions, and the years when nothing seemed to happen. We see inconsistency where someone else may see persistence. We see scattered interests where someone else may see the same question returning in different forms.

Perhaps you have never had too many ideas.

Perhaps you have been looking at the pieces one at a time.

The question may not be “Which story should I write?”

It may be: What has my life been trying to say all along?

That does not mean every idea belongs in one book. It does not mean you need to turn your entire life into a single message or force connections that are not there.

It simply means the first decision may not be choosing a format.

The first decision may be becoming curious about the thread.

Looking back, the thread in my own life was always there. It ran through the people I added to my life, the questions I kept asking, the work I chose, and the experiences I created so others could discover something for themselves.

I could not see it clearly because I was busy living it.

You may be living inside your own thread too.

Sometimes all we need is someone to help us notice what has been there all along.

That’s why I created something new.

It begins with a questionnaire where you tell me about your ideas, your experiences, what you’ve already tried, and what keeps calling you back.

Then I step back and look for the patterns that may be difficult to see from inside your own life. I share what I notice, where I think you should begin, and the first few steps that can help you move forward.

The goal isn’t to give you more ideas.

It’s to help you recognize what may already be connecting the ones you have.

Sometimes it helps to have someone sit beside you and quietly say, “I think I see something.”

I’d love to be that person for you.

It’s called the Story Clarity Audit.

If you’d like to learn more, hit reply or send me a DM and simply say, “Help me find the thread.”

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