Anyway, since I’m now in the vicinity of Hollywood, I thought I’d talk a bit about “Hollywood science” and its uses and abuses.

Hollywood science is the term many folks use to refer to the improbable, outlandish, and just-plain-wrong “science” that appears in a lot of Hollywood films and TV. The attitude often appears to be that it’s only a movie (or worse yet, only a science-fiction movie) and therefore things don’t have to be accurate. This annoys those of us who feel that even if it is only a something, it’s still science, and ought to be as accurate as possible (and, at the least, ought not to be significantly INaccurate).

Unfortunately, this is one of those areas where opinions differ as to how accurate things need to be, and how accurate they can be, given the constraints of whatever medium the writer is working with and the type of story the writer is telling. There are also differences of opinion when it comes to projecting the possibilities, which is always some aspect of science fiction. Nearly every science fiction writer I know has at some point been approached by someone who’s said “I don’t think X thing you have in your book is possible,” and then, on being told what science the author based it on and why, has said “I still don’t believe it.”

Such differences of opinion about what is and isn’t possible often lead to accusations of Hollywood science, and it’s impossible to say who is right or wrong. I choose to think that if the author did his/her homework and has a logical chain of arguments in favor of his/her projected science, then even if I don’t think it works, it doesn’t qualify as Hollywood science. But that’s me.

Where I think the line goes is when an author gets the easy stuff wrong. Confusing star systems with galaxies (or vice versa), using “lightyear” or “parsec” as a measure of time, rather than distance…those sorts of things are Hollywood science at its worst, and there’s no excuse for them. They’re pure laziness on somebody’s part.

And getting the easy stuff wrong to no purpose weakens the story. It gives the reader a reason to disbelieve, and at least some of them will take advantage of that (and then quit reading). Which is why ignoring reality, and especially ignoring real things that can be easily checked via Google, is not the best idea for most authors.

Sometimes, however, sticking to real science (and real reality) is detrimental to the story, and when that is true, the story comes first. This is, after all, fiction; by definition, it ignores reality on some basic level. There are two obvious ways I can think of for sticking too closely to real science to be detrimental to the story: 1) when doing so requires more skill in explaining than the writer possesses or the medium can bear, and 2) when the basic premise of the story is contrary to what we currently know of reality, as with fantasy or faster-than-light travel.

#1 is to some extent a judgment call, I admit. It also varies by media; what is an acceptable one-page explanation in a novel can be impossible to translate to a movie screen without slowing the story to a crawl and/or boring the audience to tears. This, I think, is one of the reasons hard SF (which SF practically requires all the whizzy science-fictional gadgets to have some solid foundation in physics-as-we-know-it-to-date) is so difficult to turn into movies or TV without warping totally out of shape. Space opera usually fares much better.

It is, however, also true that the ability to write an interesting infodump is a learned skill, and learning to do it can take a while. A writer who hasn’t yet developed that skill, and who knows he hasn’t developed it yet may be better off using handwavium that does exactly what the story requires, rather than embarking on a two-page infodump detailing why cesium, when subject to the proper pressures, behaves in exactly the same way.

#2 is also to some extent a judgment call, though it seems more obvious than #1. A lot of fantasy is intended to mimic reality in many ways except for the existence of magic or magical creatures. Where it’s supposed to seem real, the author has to stick with reality or start losing readers. Horses have to act like horses, not bicycles or motorcycles. But there are also totally surreal fantasies where the whole point is that anything is possible: flowers talk, china dolls move, monkeys can have wings and fly, woodland streams taste of lemons, etc. For those, sticking too closely to reality can ruin the fun.

What it comes down to is, as usual, not to make careless mistakes. If one is going to break the “rules” of reality, one ought to have a good idea what they are and why the particular story needs those rules to be broken. It is also a good idea to have a backup explanation for use when cornered by a fan who objects to whatever liberties one has taken with the laws of science.

I blinked at him a couple of times and then quoted Watt-Evans’ Law of Literary Creation (There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can’t get a good story out of it.) and Feist’s Corollary (There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can’t screw it up.) 

In other words, it isn’t the idea that has to be meaningful and full of depth and resonance; it’s the finished story that needs those things. Of course, he didn’t want to believe me, but it got me thinking.

How do I get from the stupid, hackneyed idea to a reasonably decent, interesting story?

Well, I start by looking at the parts of the story that aren’t included in the idea. Ideas, by their nature, need to be developed and expanded in order to become stories. They aren’t complete in themselves, or they’d be the stories we make them into. So whatever the idea is that one starts with, it’s missing something.

A lot of the ideas that get lumped into the “stupid or hackneyed or clichéd” category are plot ideas: the orphaned hero turns out to be the lost heir to the throne, for instance. What’s missing is characters (by which I mean “specific people with names and individual personalities,” rather than just roles like “orphaned hero” or “smart-mouthed sidekick”) and setting. Some of the “hackneyed or clichéd” ideas are the characters who’ve been around the block too many times: the spunky young girl, the thief with a heart of gold, the mustache-twirling villain, the noble hero who’s good at everything. What they’re missing is plot and setting. And of course Generic Fantasy Setting #2,349 needs a plot and characters.

So I look at the cliché “orphaned hero is lost heir” and I think about just who that orphaned hero/heroine is. Somebody different; somebody unexpected. Maybe she’s a Goth girl with no patience whatever for the rules of the court she’s suddenly thrust into. Maybe he’s an emo poet, or really, really, really wants to play major league football, and to heck with this being a king stuff. Maybe she’s the absolutely perfect ideal the court has been hoping for…too perfect? How’d she get that way, when she didn’t know she was a princess? What’s she really thinking, underneath all that perfection? What if my orphaned hero is a gang member (or equivalent)?

Or I look at the cliché and I think about where it could take place that would be interesting and different. Aliens. Insectoid aliens…maybe something like bees, where the new queen has to destroy all her competitors? Or merpeople – I could combine the “lost heir” with one of the selkie legends about the selkie maiden who was trapped by the fisherman and forced to live as his wife until she found the sealskin he stole from her. That’s certainly one way for the True Heir to get lost.

Telling a familiar story from the point of view of a normally-minor character often works well – the maid or valet, the coachman, the cook, the captain of the guard, all can bring a fresh perspective to a familiar tale…or sometimes spin off it sideways into stories of their own, for which the familiar “main” story ends up being no more than something happening in the background.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to execution. You can make anything sound horrible and clichéd and stupid in a summary, without even trying much. (“The Lord of The Rings” is about a short guy with hairy toes who throws a ring in a volcano.) And if you boil things down far enough, there aren’t any original plots…that’s why Heinlein could claim that all plots are variations or combinations of only three fundamental types. It’s the final product – the total impression made by 90,000+ words of novel – that’s going to be meaningful and inspiring and interesting and deep. Not the log-line.

The truth is that you’re not out of ideas until you’re dead, or maybe insane. Not really. What people mean when they say they’re “out of ideas” is one of three things: 1) For one reason or another, they don’t recognize what they’re getting as ideas, 2) The ideas they’re getting aren’t acceptable to them, or 3) They don’t know how to poke at their backbrain constructively.

#1 usually happens when people are used to getting whole stories, or at least large chunks of them, all at once. They don’t know how to take a character or a situation or a wispy hint of plot and develop it into a story, so they don’t recognize those things as ideas. They’re like someone who’s only ever gardened from mid-July to the first of September, when everything is in bloom; they’ve learned to pull weeds and make lovely flower arrangements, but not how to sprout seeds or thin seedlings, or how to tell the weeds that come up in May from the vegetables and flowers that are coming back at the same time. Usually, these folks figure things out pretty fast once they realize that there’s frequently more to the process than just taking dictation from one’s backbrain (much as we all love it when it works out that way).

#2 covers everything from “I can’t think of anything original!” to “But I don’t want to write a romance about space monkeys!” to “My mother will kill me if I write about X!” There are two basic approaches to these kinds of objections: go ahead and write it anyway, as a practice piece that will never be shown to anyone (suitable for the non-original and/or homicidal parent problems…and one can always change one’s mind about the “practice” part later), or poke at the unsatisfactory idea until it become satisfactory.

Which brings me to #3.

There are lots of ways to poke at your backbrain, whether the object is to develop an existing, inadequate idea or generate something totally new. The most obvious is brainstorming. You pick a topic - a random word from a dictionary, or something logical like “possible main characters,” or whatever you want. Then you set a timer for about ten minutes, and write down whatever comes to mind. The rules are: everything that comes up gets written down, no matter how stupid, crazy, or weird; and you have to keep writing all-out, full-steam-ahead until the timer goes off. Then you take each idea, one at a time, (all of them, or the “best” three, or whatever) and use them as topics, until something shows up that you don’t want to move on from when the timer goes off.

You can also use the three-random-things game, where you come up with three or four completely disparate things or actions or characters or events and try to come up with a plot connection among them: “tortellini with pesto sauce; an exceedingly ordinary middle-class American couple; an antique car; a terrorist threat to the Sydney Olympics” “a classical violinist; an avalanche; children playing ‘ring-around-the-rosie.”

If you’ve got a bunch of friends to help play, you give everybody an index card and ask them to write descriptions of two people/characters (one per card); an event (on another card); a plot-problem (on another card); an object (on another card) and so on. Then you collect the cards and shuffle them and lay them out. You can form them up in a sentence, if you want: “Hero is a (character card) whose problem with Villain (character card) is (plot-problem card). They clash at (event or location card); the problem is solved by (object card).” (Example: Hero is a classical violinist whose problem with the Villain, an eight-year-old computer genius, is stopping the Villain from taking over the Republic. They clash at a football game; the problem is solved by a banana.”) They usually do come out just about that silly, if you do them randomly…but it can be fun.

You can combine really unlikely characters and/or plots from two completely different stories, authors, or genres. Sherlock Holmes instead of Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet”; Aral Vorkosigan and Elizabeth Bennet in Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series; Dirty Harry in “The Lord of the Rings” (“I’ve lost track of how many spells I have left in this wand, Saruman. So, do you feel lucky today, punk? Do you?”) Or you can come up with a “cast” of characters from your favorites from other stories or movies. The idea is not so much to come up with a useable alternative as to get your mind unfrozen…but sometimes you do come up with a combination you like.

If you are visually inclined, browse the web for pictures that tickle your backbrain. (Caroline Stevermer does this on her Pinterest pages.) Decide who the people are or could be; think of something that could happen in a place; imagine what’s going on in a painting and make up how the people got into that situation (or what’s going to happen next).

Take one of the bits-and-pieces that’s floating around in your head – some proto-idea that hasn’t hit critical mass yet. Maybe it’s a phrase like “silver on the wine-dark sea;” maybe it’s a scene or a character; maybe it’s even a general subject like “I want to write a book about families.” Then start plot-noodling it. Look at pictures in search of people that look like they’d “go with” the proto-idea. Brainstorm it. Spin off a list of ten things from a related category: “Races: horse race, race to find cure for plague, space race, boat race, race to get Death Star plans back to the Rebellion, race against time, marathon, gold rush, Indy 500″.

What you’re trying to do here is stir things up. If you focus too hard on “getting an idea,” you probably won’t come up with anything – like those times when somebody says “Where shall we go for dinner?” and you suddenly cannot for the life of you think of the name of a single restaurant, not even McDonalds.

Which means I am now looking at my huge list of Possible Things To Write and contemplating which idea(s) to start poking at. My agent has weighed in, and so have several of my friends; they’re all pretty much in agreement, so unless my publisher gets really demanding about some other possibility (and does so pretty soon, before I’m totally committed to this project), I probably have settled on The Next Thing.

And what it started with was this:

No shit, there I was –

What, you don’t like the opening?  Listen, it’s fairy tales that start “once upon a time.”  War stories are supposed to start “No shit, there I was.”

So, no shit, there I was, thread in one hand, needle in the other, and a silk bolt worth four thousand isiri spread over my lap, when -

Now what?  Oh, you think this doesn’t sound much like a war story?

In the last few weeks of thinking about this rather minimal story-seed, I added a McGuffin (although I have no idea yet why it’s significant), a notion of what happens in the first half of the opening scene, and the barest hint of a plot thread. Oh, and two, count them, two secondary characters, one of whom probably won’t be around for more than two chapters, tops.

This is not much to start writing a novel with.

I could just take what I have and keep writing for a while, to see what happens and what I come up with. I already know, however, that this seldom works well for me, so I’m not going to start by trying that. I need to develop what I have a bit more, until it gets past the Critical Mass point and really starts rolling, and that means poking at what I have until new things show up and start to gel.

The question always is, where and how to poke. Up until last weekend, the obvious point to poke at this story was the characters. The story needs more of them, and I need to know more about the few that I already have (well, about two of them, anyway. I don’t think I really need to know much more about the one who’s disappearing within two or three chapters). And characters and what they want or need (but can’t have…yet) are the heart of most stories.

So I’ve been thinking about these people off and on: who they are, where they come from, what they’re each trying to do and why. I was thinking about the second character, the one who’s not the protagonist but who will be a major player, and why that was happening…and I figured out something about the McGuffin. And suddenly, I had a structure for my plot.

As soon as this happened, where I need to poke at this idea changed. See, structure is fundamental for me. It’s what goes under the plot, to hold it up. What I need to know next, for me to be able to finish that first scene, is what I’m going to build on that structure and why. Once I know that, I’ll know who the rest of the characters have to be and what they’ll have to do. Undoubtedly, that will change the plot – once I have characters and they start acting and interacting, they always end up changing the plot details. That’s what makes it all work, for me.

But the characters and incidents won’t change the structure. That’s solid. I know how many incidents I need, and the effect they have on the McGuffin; now I need to figure out what they are and why the villain set things up this way and how they’re going to affect my characters. (I’m not too worried about how my heroine is going to mess up the villain’s plans; after that opening, I have no doubt she’ll think of something.) Oh, and I need a villain…the structure requires one.

If this were going to be a different book, or if it had started with a different set of bits – say, a well-developed setting and a bunch of characters, but no plot or structure – I’d probably have started by poking at the characters. The point isn’t how I’m doing this, or that anyone else ought to work the same way. The point here is: 1) The basic idea needs a lot more development before I can make much forward progress; 2) The development doesn’t just happen; it requires poking; 3) Where I poke keeps changing, depending on how much I’ve already figured out.

Changing where I poke at ideas is part of the process of developing them. I don’t make up a list of characters, then figure out everything about their backgrounds and personalities and desires before I ever start thinking about plot or setting. I think about a character for a bit, then about the McGuffin for a bit, then about a different character, then maybe about the setting/history/culture.

This morning, in conversation with Beth-my-walking-buddy, I got a handle on the villain, and the whole plot changed. So did one of my two supposedly-known secondary characters. The structure’s still the same, though, and so’s the McGuffin; a little more background, and I’ll be ready to start writing my first totally-wrong outline.

(Julie D, I’ll put up the post on agents on Sunday, when I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit more.)

So what these folks really want and need to know isn’t where to get a new story idea; it’s how to get the idea they have to “enough.”

“Critical mass” is what I call that point, and I have about twenty story ideas backed up that aren’t at the critical mass point yet. They’re ideas; they’re interesting to me; but they don’t have quite enough there for them to really start moving. Once I finish the current book, I will consult with my agent and editor, pick one of those ideas, and start developing it. I expect that with sufficient attention, I could get any one of them going within a couple of weeks, but if I give it my best shot and it still won’t start moving on its own within that time frame, I’ll send it back to the farm team and pick a different one.

In other words, I don’t just sit around waiting for one of those twenty-plus ideas to start growing. I work at it, the way gardners work at their gardening. Water, fertilizer, sunshine, drainage…

What does all that mean in terms of story?

For me, working at an idea starts by looking at what I have, and turning it this way and that to see different possibilities. I’ve had two of them start inching through the development stage in the past week. One glommed on to a passing bit of background – a notion I had that wasn’t even really an idea yet, more of a proto-idea or possibility. I was considering adding it to the idea queue, but it wasn’t even enough for that – no characters, no plot, not even a complete bit of background, just an idea of a room and what people did there. And since I’ve been thinking about my idea queue a lot lately (because that’s what happens when I’m a month or less from finishing up a current project), I found myself thinking “You know, this might work in Max’s story…” And the next thing I knew, I was thinking about exactly how it might work, which characters it might affect directly, how that would play into their behavior, all the new plot-possibilities that it would open up…

The other one had about three pages written, but just…wasn’t moving. (It’s one of the ones I put back in the queue the last time I went through this process.) It didn’t need anything new to get it going; all it needed was a shift in perspective. I was running through my list with my agent (see “consult with,” above), when I realized that the problem was that I’d picked the wrong character to be the main character and central viewpoint. “This would be much more interesting if I picked one of the characters things are actually happening to,” I thought, and bingo, large chunks of plot started rearranging themselves in a much more fascinating order.

Both of those story-developments were moderately serendipitous – I wasn’t so much poking at those specific ideas as I was sort of generally thinking about my to-write list and which things I might want to work on next and whether I could actually get any of them going. But I’ve been doing this for over thirty years now, and my backbrain has gotten into the habit of tossing possibilities up in the air when I’m at this stage. (Habit can be a wonderful thing, when it works in your favor.) From here on, though, I won’t be sitting around waiting for something else to bubble up out of the compost. I’ll be poking around and trying out different possibilities.

The way I do this is usually to shuttle back and forth between plot, backstory, and characters, looking at what I don’t know about them yet and trying out different things to see if they fit. Does this main character have any relatives – an aunt, perhaps, or a brother? Maybe a cousin? Aunt doesn’t feel right, nor does brother; I think she’s an orphan. A distant cousin, though…that might work. Put those down on the list as possiblities – orphan, distant cousin – switch to plot. Is she going to save the world? Revamp her society? No, those don’t feel quite right. Staving off some sort of catastrophe, okay, but not a world-threatening one. City-threatening, maybe, or country-threatening. No idea what it could be yet, so on to the next thing.

Background…she’s an orphan, so when did her parents die? Right away, I’m positive she didn’t know them, so it must have happened early in her life. How? War? No, doesn’t feel right. Plague? That works. So there was a big plague about ten to twelve years back. Maybe that ties into my present-day plot? Maybe some industries are still just starting to come back? Not sure; think about that later. Back to the plot and characters - am I going to have a villain? X could make a good one, but I like him too much already…maybe there’s someone in the shadows behind him? Like the emperor behind Darth Vader. Yes, good, that works. So who’s the new guy in the shadows, and what’s his background? What’s he after? No clue, so move on to the next bit; his part will come clear sooner or later.

Eventually, all these bits and pieces will start coming together and I’ll write my first, tentative (and completely wrong) plot outline. This is more to give me something to ring changes on than it is a serious attempt at figuring out how the story will go. I talk with my friends and we toss possibilities around, and I get annoyed with them for haring off in directions that interest them but don’t appeal to me. I may draw a map, or do a bunch of appendix-like background summaries for my own use. Or I may not. I start making lists: of characters, of places, of things I need to research, of things that need to go in, of things that need to stay out.

The point is, by then it’s moving. It may be anywhere from another week to a couple of months before I sit down and start writing, but what I have is not just an idea any more. It’s gotten through the preliminary development, and it’s a baby story.

It’s hard partly because not only is every writer different, both in their general process and in the specifics of how-they-do-it, but nearly every story is different. It’d be a lot easier if I could hand the eager or desperate young writers a card with a post office box number on it, but I can’t. So here are some other things to look at.

In the long term, getting ideas is a matter of how you look at the world. I’ve posted about this before, so I won’t go into great detail here, but basically it’s a matter of not taking the ordinary for granted. You can find stories in commonplace things, from grocery lists to car repairs, if you look at them slantwise and ask yourself the right questions. (“Right” in this case being whatever sorts of questions make your backbrain start giving off little sparks. For some writers, those are character-related questions, like “where does the alien embassy get its groceries, anyway?” or “what is a dark dwarf doing fixing people’s cars?”; for others, the questions are plot-related, or theme-related, or…whatever. You have to figure out for yourself what angle you approach things from, but once you do, it’s usually not too much trouble to keep doing it. In fact, once you learn how, it’s hard to turn the dratted thing off.)

In the short term, though, people are impatient. Also, a lot of folks haven’t ever learned how to brainstorm, or even how to just poke around looking for possible ideas. Heck, a lot of folks haven’t the first idea where to go to start poking. So here are some suggestions.

A lot of writers are very verbal (big surprise), so one of the logical places to start looking for ideas is with words. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of places on the web and elsewhere that will provide “writing prompts” – short suggestions to get you going. Or you can make up your own; a really popular one used to be to open a dictionary twice at random, take the first word at the top of the first page and the last word at the bottom of the second page, and see what you could come up with to link them all together. Another is to take several of your favorite poems and pull out six or eight phrases (three to four words each) that really appeal to you, write them on cards and dump them in a jar, pull two, and come up with something that ties them together.

For writers who are more aural than verbal, songs and music can be a similar sort of idea-trigger. One can get even more direct and take one of the many songs (modern or traditional) that tells a story in six dense verses, and expand it into ten pages of prose, or even into a novel. (Fairy tales work fine for that, too, but that’s back to words.) Quite a few writers I know have gone so far as to assemble play lists of songs that “fit” whatever story they’re currently writing, to keep them in the right mood while they work.

Pictures and photos can trigger a writer’s imagination, too, whether they’re ones you took yourself, or things you’ve found on the web or in an old shoebox at a garage sale. Objects, too – “Why on earth would anyone buy that?” can be a perfectly good story-trigger, and so can “The people who put together this garage sale must be aliens…wait a minute…”

Everybody has thoughts like that; the trick is to slow them down so that you notice whenever you think “That is so weird” or “I don’t understand why anyone would…” or “What were they thinking?” And then, once you’ve noticed, to come up with a possible explanation or answer, or even just a mental picture of the sort of person who is that weird, who would do that, and who was thinking…something interesting.

Fanfiction aside, other people’s stories can actually be a pretty good place to look for ideas, too. Nottaking someone else’s background or plot or characters and redoing them, but looking at the things you’d put in, or do differently, and then dropping all of their characters and background and plot and riffing off just those missing/different bits that appeal to you. Change the characters and setting, and you have a brand-new story, even if the source material is recognizable. It worked for West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet), and for Working Girl (Cinderella), and for countless other things.

And one of my favorite methods is to take two characters from completely different stories – Prince Hamlet, say, and Darth Vader – change their names, and throw them into the setting from a third story (Lord of the Rings, maybe, or Oz) and see what happens.

That’s the first half of the answer to the “where do you get your ideas?” question, and it’s what most people want to know when they ask it. It is not, however, all that they need to know…that’s for the next post, on Sunday.

A story idea can be anything – a scrap of dialog, a scene, a setting, a situation, a character or two, a plot - that the writer finds intriguing and wants to follow up. Step one is usually writing the idea down somewhere, which is why so many writing books advocate keeping a writing journal or an idea file. Step two is developing the idea, which means figuring out what all the missing components are.

And there’s always something missing. Scraps of dialog usually (but not always) come with characters attached (somebody has to be saying that stuff), but often have no plot (or only hints of one) or setting. Settings and situations usually don’t come with characters, and even a plot may only arrive with stick-figure sketches of people where the actual characters ought to be. And so on.

These things don’t just magically show up when you sit down to write (well, unless you’re one of the writers whose process involves surprising themselves, but if you are, you’ve probably figured that out already). For the rest of us, those missing bits have to be developed before the story is ready to write.

As with every aspect of writing, there are lots of different ways to go about this, from making formal outlines and summaries to taking long walks in the wood or using action figures to model bits of storyline. But if you step back a pace or two, there are two fundamental ways that story ideas develop: 1) From the inside out, and 2) From the outside in.

For writers who work from the inside out, the starting idea is like a seed. It needs to be planted and watered and allowed to grow before it’s ready to make into a story. Again, this manifests in different ways, but the one thing that story-seed can’t be is ignored. Thinking about the things that are missing and paying attention to the hints that are there in whatever the writer already knows; wondering how the characters came to be in this situation or who might participate in that plot or what the people are like who live in this place – all that can be the equivalent of feeding and watering and weeding. A lot of clues are usually right there in the idea-seed; it’s a matter of looking for them.

For writers who work from the outside in, the starting idea is more like one of those seed-crystals they used to demonstrate crystal formation in my high school chemistry class – the one where you make a super-saturated solution of something like salt or sugar or alum and then lower one tiny grain of whatever-it-is into the goo and a week later you come back and there’s a perfectly faceted crystal the size of a golf ball that’s grown from the stuff in the solution layering itself onto the outside of the seed crystal.

When a story idea grows this way, the writer looks around for other scraps and ideas and bits that fit the existing seed-crystal. Instead of looking at the setting and thinking, “What kind of people live here?” the writer looks at people and characters (in real life or other fiction) and thinks “Would somebody like this work in that setting?” It’s like holding auditions for a play; there are far more real and imaginary people than you need to have as characters in a book, so even if you reject the first ten or twenty, sooner or later the right one will come along and you have your lead. Instead of looking at a character-seed-crystal and thinking “Where does this person live? Who are her friends? What does she want?” the writer thinks “Would she live in this house? Would she befriend that person? Is this thing something she wants?”

Most of the writers I know use both methods, though they have individual biases in one direction or another. It ends up being something of a circular process for a lot of us – looking at the developing seed or seed-crystal to see what’s missing, then looking around outside to see if anything fits, then looking at the inside to see if the newly added bit implies more interesting things, until the story has enough there that it’s ready to write.

How one develops an idea depends largely on the writer and the idea. For a lot of us, the first stage is kind of like the effect of a particle accelerator: two or more interesting ideas go around and around in your brain until they smash into each other at high speed, causing a chain reaction. Other times, the initial development is more like putting a seed crystal in a supersaturated solution and letting it grow. Still other times, the writer needs to consciously and deliberately fill in whatever key bits are missing from the original interesting notion – adding some characters and background to an interesting plot idea, or coming up with a plot for the interesting characters to get mixed up in.

The key thing, no matter which way you end up trying to start the story development, is that everything in the story has to fit somehow with everything else. You can’t just throw in random things, no matter how cool they seem. For me, this part is mostly a matter of instinct – and sometimes, the instinct doesn’t kick in as soon as I’d like it to, and I do a whole lot of development that I have to throw out later because it doesn’t fit for some reason.

All of this, by the way, is stuff that happens before any actual writing begins. I call it “getting to critical mass” – getting an idea developed enough that it can become a story. How much conscious development an idea needs depends on the writer. Some folks like to sit down at a blank screen and surprise themselves; other folks like to have a meticulously detailed outline and a ton of notes to follow.

I’m somewhere in the middle. Once I get to critical mass, I sit down and do an outline. (I never follow the outline, but making one gives me something to rebel against and helps me organize my thoughts about the plot.) I start researching anything I know I’m going to need to research, and detailing any background or worldbuilding that I think I’m going to want. This is also the point where I start hauling my friends out to dinner to help me plot-noodle.

What I’m talking about here is the getting-started part that so many non-writers find so mysterious. “Getting ideas” for what happens next once the story is underway is a whole ‘nother post, which I hope to get to at the end of the week. (Sorry to wait so long, but I’m out of town until Thursday.)

But it’s not really the ideas themselves that are hard.  For instance, anyone can sit down and come up with a grocery list. The trouble is that “broccoli, milk, hamburger buns, toilet paper” is not normally perceived as story material. But as soon as you ditch that perception and start looking at the possibilities, it changes. So a normal grocery list doesn’t seem much like story material…what sort of list could be story material? ”Broccoli, vardun swela, skim milk, flies-in-amber, eggs.”  OK–what’s vardun swela?  Why are flies-in-amber on the list — is that some new weird food, or does it really mean amber with flies in it?  Who (or what) is eating that amber and vardun-whatever-it-is:  is it company (long-term house guests, or dinner party?), or does this person have a housemate/significant other/family member/pet who isn’t human, or is the list-writer the one who’s not human and it’s the company/SO/etc. who needs the “special” (normal) food?  How did the list-writer get into whatever situation requires buying this odd mix of foods?  How important is it?  Is he going to have a hard time finding vardun swela, or is it carried everywhere now?  Is it an expensive import, or the equivalent of cat food?  Why does he want it? Who did this list, anyway?

And the next thing you know, you’ve got a story about a college boy at Roswell University whose dorm room is haunted by the ghost of an alien that won’t leave until it gets a proper meal…or a harried woman planning her first dinner party with her daughter’s prospective in-laws, who happen to be elves…or a future diplomat engaged in touchy negotiations with some aliens, who is trying to get his stomach used to their food (which tastes and smells like rotten eggs) before the big banquet tomorrow night…or whatever else strikes your fancy.  From contemplating a grocery list.

 The trick is teaching yourself to look at everyday things this way (it doesn’t come naturally to everyone, not even to all writers). Creative brainstorming is one way of training it, and it’s the most fun if you get a group together, though you can do it alone. You pick a topic, or open a dictionary and pick two random words, or have everyone in the room write down a one-sentence character description, a one-sentence description of an object, and an action on separate pieces of paper. Mix the words or sentences or topics in a bowl and draw two or three; then set a timer for ten minutes and begin writing a list of ideas and associations and possible plots.

What you’re trying to do here is stir things up.  If you focus too hard on “getting an idea,” you probably won’t come up with anything – like those times when somebody says “Where shall we go for dinner?” and you suddenly cannot for the life of you think of the name of a single restaurant, not even McDonalds. If you just look slantwise at normal, everyday things, it becomes a habit after a while, and pretty soon you have more ideas than you know what to do with.

Anything can be the start of a story, if you look at it right…but you have to be looking at it, not at “I want a story.”  It’s how you look at things, not what things you look at.

Except the strip of tape they used wasn’t quite long enough to cover the whole line. So the sign now reads “SIN…..AHEAD.”

I can’t figure out whether it’s a warning or a command.

And people wonder where writers get their ideas…