forgotten

Alan Bennett wrote in one of his marvelously entertaining volumes of reminiscence that he only really felt like a writer if he was actually engaged in writing something.
That's a sentiment any writer can probably recognise and to some extent share. When I am writing, I tend to be energised by the project, filled with a strong sense of purpose. But the method that works best for my stories is months of cogitation followed by a few weeks of focused toil over the keyboard. I don't see that changing now. There is something slightly bonkers about the 4am starts when the finish is in sight but for me, well - if it isn't broken, don't fix it.
Every writer has a slightly different method. I make a few notes in a Moleskine notebook and then tap the novel out on an old Compaq laptop my son gave me when the hard drive on my iBook expired a few years ago halfway through writing Dark Echo (thanks, Apple - I'd only ever used it as a word processor and still fail to see how it could have got so knackered on such simplistic usage).
Here, finally, is my point. About ten years ago, before I began the Moleskine habit, I had this idea for a novel. It concerned a wealthy man who decides to restore his vast estate to the deciduous forest it must have been before England - completely covered in forest in the Dark Ages - began to be cleared for cultivation. He employs an arborealist to transform the land - at the edge of the sea - with mature trees.
In doing so, the landowner violates something ancient and triggers something malevolent and old. And his beautiful daughter is involved. And the arborealist, a young man, is involved too.
Except that when this came back to me, that was all that came back. The rest might return and might not. My rueful point is, whatever type of writer you are make notes. And keep them somewhere safe.