Once you “have an idea,” the next bit of the process for most writers is developing it into a story.
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.)
When I first started writing (6th grade through high school), I’d get that initial idea or chracter and just start writing. I have a lot of unfinished stories from that time, because I’d reach a point where I just didn’t know where I was going. Lately, I’m trying to consciously fill in the details, grow the seed, before writing. I’m not a ‘follow the outline’ person, either, but I’m trying to have a better sense of a story before I put down any words.
[As an aside, I’ve been following your blog for a few months, and I’ve really enjoyed your posts and your analogous examples (making a soup and the grocery list, come to mind).]
Sabrina – Your unfinished stories may indeed be a result of trying to start writing without having done quite enough development, but you may just be hitting the first speed bump. There’s a point early on in a novel (usually somewhere between Chapter 4 and Chapter 10 for me) where it just slows way down, or even stalls, for most writers. Unfortunately, the only way I know of to get through this is to sit down and do it anyway…and it can be hard to distinguish from the “not having done enough development” problem and the “miserable middle problem.” So the basic technique is: If whatever you are doing does not seem to be working very well, try doing something else (“doing something else” in this context does not mean giving up and switching to another story; it means doing more development if you haven’t been, or just making yourself write, if you haven’t been, or maybe even skipping ahead to a new scene or doing a more elaborate outline or pitching the outline you have – in other words, trying a different working process).
These posts are wonderful! Have you considered putting them together into a book?
There are definitely a few of those old stories which are more the ‘miserable middle’ problem–one was 40 pages hand-written, another 90 or so. They may be a combination of both problems. 😛 I still enjoy those stories, though, and want to return to them, but I think they’d both need to be rewritten from the beginning. I have definitely felt the middle slump in later (completed) novels and learned to work through them (either skipping ahead or just plowing through).
My “ideas” tended to come in the shape of complete scenes, or dialogue exchanges or even a character description, and “what to do” with them, consisted of trying to figure out where they fit, and where to put them – sometimes I didn’t even know who these people were! It was like being given random pieces of a puzzle, and then having to fit them together – it was fun… (sighs nostalgically)
Actually, after a long time (many years), a fresh scene has come to me – and it explains how come some of my characters were going about selling washing-powder door to door… 🙂