Don’t you hate it when you think of something wonderful, or important, or simply entertaining, and it disappears before you have a chance to jot it down? I know when I have an idea, maybe for a blog entry or a great line for a play I’m writing, I need to grab my pen and notebook immediately or it slips right by.

Oftentimes, my “great ideas” come to me when I’m in the shower, or drifting off to sleep, or driving a familiar route. In other words, when my minds is on semi-automatic pilot. When the left side of the brain is otherwise engaged, the creative right side gets a chance to leap forward with all kinds of interesting possibilities.

Recently, while talking with a friend, a catchy phrase briefly caught my attention and I instantly thought “STOP TALKING AND WRITE IT DOWN!” But alas, I didn’t stop talking (what a surprise!) and several minutes later I was totally baffled as to what had caught my interest.

So I stopped my friend in mid-sentence and said, “Help me! We have to go back and figure out what I thought I could write about!” And slowly, we were able to revisit and reconstruct our topics of conversation until… “OMG! THAT’S IT!”

All was not lost—at least not permanently—and I quickly jotted a few words down for future use. It wasn’t all that life-determining to remember what we’d been speaking about, but it IS it’s definitely a relief that I CAN still remember the past few minutes!