One Line or It Doesn't Count: The Filter That Shrank My Idea Graveyard

My sketchbook has a back section I used to call the graveyard. It's full of half-started things — a story opening, four thumbnails of a comic that never got a second page, a note that says "interactive map thing??" with three underlines. Every few months I'd flip through it and feel bad, then add more.

The graveyard isn't full of bad ideas. That's the problem. It's full of ideas that felt like something in the moment and then couldn't survive contact with an actual work session. So I made a rule that was mostly an act of frustration:

Every new idea has to be written as one sentence before it gets any of my time.

One sentence. No paragraphs, no mood boards, no "I'll figure out the middle later." If I can't get it into a single line, it stays in the notes app as a captured thought and nothing more.

The Rule, and the Two Exceptions I Actually Allow

I'm not a monster, so there are exceptions. Anything that's purely a texture or a feeling gets a pass — sometimes I just want to draw a rainy window and there's no sentence in that. And client work is exempt, because the client already wrote the sentence for me, usually in an email with nine bullet points.

Everything else goes through the gate.

What surprised me is how quickly the rule stopped feeling like a restriction. It takes about thirty seconds to write a sentence. Thirty seconds is nothing. But it turns out that's exactly enough time for a vague enthusiasm to either find a spine or quietly fall apart, and I'd rather find that out in half a minute than on a Tuesday night three weeks from now.

Why the Sentence Is So Brutal

A paragraph can hide. A paragraph can say "there's this guy, and he works at a lighthouse, and there's a radio, and it's about loneliness but also maybe family, and it might be a comic." Every clause is a place to hide.

A sentence can't hide, because a sentence has to name who changes and what it costs them. The instant I try to write one, I find out whether I have a story or just an atmosphere. Atmospheres are wonderful. They are not projects.

Here's a before-and-after from my own notebook, unedited, because I think it's fair to show you the ugly parts.

Before: "Lighthouse keeper, last broadcast, quiet, maybe a series of short comics, kind of about being the last person who remembers something."

After: "A lighthouse keeper keeps broadcasting to a town that has already evacuated, and has to decide whether to admit the last listener is a recording."

Same idea. Completely different amount of oxygen in the room. The first version could have become six different comics, and probably would have become none. The second version has a shape, and I can feel where the pressure is.

What a Decent Sentence Looks Like

The template I keep coming back to is dumb, and I mean that as a compliment:

A [specific person] who [wants something concrete] has to [do a hard thing] before [a deadline or a cost], or [what they lose].

You don't have to fill every bracket. But the empty ones will tell you where you're bluffing. Here's how it plays out on a few kinds of work:

A comic: "A night-shift clerk at a convenience store starts finding notes in the register that predict what each customer will steal, and has to decide whether to warn the one person she likes."

A sketch series: "Twelve drawings of the same parking garage at the same hour, each one showing one more person who doesn't leave."

A small interactive thing: "A page where you sort a dead relative's belongings into keep, give, and throw, with a limited number of keeps, and no undo."

Notice that none of these explain the style, the color, the medium, or the vibe. That's on purpose. Those decisions get easier once the sentence exists, and harder if you make them first.

Three Tests I Run Before I Trust a Line

The "and then" ban. If my sentence needs "and then" to make sense, I have two ideas wearing one coat. Split them. Pick the one I'd stay up for.

Name the change. By the end of the thing, someone or something should be different. If I can't say what, I don't have a story — I have a setting looking for a reason to exist.

The one-verb test. Loose verbs like "explores" and "deals with" are where bad sentences go to nap. Replace them with something a person could actually be filmed doing. "Explores memory" becomes "has to throw out one box." Much better.

There's a fourth test I use on the sentence itself: read it out loud. If I'm embarrassed by how plain it sounds, that's usually a sign I was hoping the execution would cover for a fuzzy idea.

What Actually Changed

The obvious win is that fewer projects start. I'd estimate I've killed roughly two out of every three ideas at the sentence stage this year, and the ones that made it have had a much better survival rate. My graveyard has twelve entries instead of forty, and half of them have real work attached.

The less obvious win is speed of decision. When a collaborator pitches me something, I now ask for the sentence before we talk about anything else. This has made me a slightly more annoying email correspondent and a much better one to work with, because we spend the first conversation on the idea rather than on materials.

And there's a quieter benefit I didn't expect. Writing the sentence has become part of the fun. It's a tiny puzzle with a clear win condition, and doing ten of them in a sitting feels like cleaning a very small, very satisfying room.

Where the Rule Breaks Down

I'll be honest about the limits. This approach punishes slow-burn work — the kind of project that only reveals its sentence after six months of wandering. Some of my favorite things I've ever made started as pure noise. If a promising idea keeps failing the sentence test but still won't leave you alone, that's data too. It probably means the sentence isn't the right shape yet, not that the idea is dead.

The other risk is turning the sentence into the artwork. A good pitch line is not a story, and there's a certain kind of person (me, in March) who starts optimizing the one-liner instead of making the thing. If you find yourself writing a fifth draft of the sentence and zero drafts of the project, close the notebook and go make the project badly.

Try It This Week

Set a timer for twenty minutes. Open your notes app and pick ten ideas, old or new. Give each one a single sentence using the template above. No editing on the first pass. When the timer ends, mark the three you'd actually start tonight and cross out the rest without guilt — they're not lost, they're just waiting until they have a sentence.

That's the whole challenge. One line or it doesn't count. It sounds like a constraint, but six months in, it feels more like permission to stop pretending.