“Getting an idea” is a bit like having a bowl full of flour. You can stir in some sugar and salt and baking powder and spices, and you still have a bowl of white powder that doesn’t stick together to make anything. You can cut in a bunch of butter, and you get a bowl of damp-looking yellowish powder that still doesn’t look like it will make anything. And then you add the egg, or some milk, and suddenly you have cookie dough that you can bake. But at what point did it become “cookie dough”? If you started with flour and salt and butter, and added cold water, you wouldn’t get cookie dough, you’d get pie crust. If you add yeast instead of baking powder and mix it a bit differently, you can end up with cinnamon bread instead of cookies. Adding the liquid is the point of no return, where what you have is a bowl of dough you can do something with instead of a bowl of powder, but what you put in the flour before you add the liquid determines whether you’re going to get bread, cookies, cake, or pie crust. So which bit is the “first” part of making whatever you made?
Writers collect bits of ideas that are like a bowl of flour – they don’t stick together, they don’t make the basis for a story, they’re just a little more white powder added to a bowl. You don’t even always know what kind of powder you’re adding—whether it’s flour or sugar or baking soda. And then one day another bit comes along that’s sticky and attractive and that pulls a bunch of pieces together into story-dough that you can make something with, but what you can make of it depends on what sorts of bits and pieces were part of the powder in the bowl to begin with.
I usually get plot and backstory fairly early on in what I perceive as my process, but part of that is that I don’t classify powder-collection as the start of a story. The “planning a novel” part doesn’t usually happen until I have some story-dough to work with, and by the time that happens, a lot of things have already been determined by the ingredients that went in before things started sticking together. And when all I have is a setting, an incident, or a character, it isn’t dough yet.
There is a particularly difficult point when the story-dough is starting to look like it’s coming together, like a flour-salt-riser mixture for biscuits that I’ve been cutting butter into. The mixture is crumbly, sticky in places; if I packed it in a pan, it would look as if it would hold together. But if I baked it that way, it would crumble the minute I took it out of the pan. It needs more – more butter and some sugar, if I want to make shortbread; more liquid (usually milk or buttermilk) if I want biscuits or bread; some eggs and sugar if I want cookies or cake…and, of course, spices.
Throwing random ingredients into the story-dough at this point won’t work any better than it does in real life, which is to say, once in a while it works and you get something fabulous, but most of the time, it doesn’t work and you end up with something barely edible, if that. What goes in next has to be thoughtfully chosen ingredients, which will depend on the proportions of what you already have, plus some idea of what you want to end up with.
The story ingredients I most often start with are a situation, a scenelet, or a character’s voice (e.g., “Mother taught me to be polite to dragons,” or “Everybody knows that the seventh son of a seventh son is born lucky.”) In order to develop that into a story, I need more … but to figure out what more is, I need to know what I already have. So the first question I ask myself is “What is going on right here/now?” The situation is a multi-species fantasy school – how old is it? Exactly what species attend – just humanoids, like dwarves and elves and humans, or intelligent dragons and unicorns? What does it teach that appeals to different species, and how does it handle classes (and dorms!) when there are different comfort requirements? The scenelet is a mental image of a man crashing through the door/window of a clothing shop, watched by the startled clerk – did he deliberately break through the door/window (attacking), or was he thrown during a fight in the street outside? Is the clerk more likely to scream and run, or to say “That’ll be fifty marks for replacing the door, and seven bits for the cleanup. Who should I send the bill to?”
The next question is usually an expanded version of “What’s going on?” Are the school’s problems mainly internal (e.g. coping with inter-species friction) or external (a war that’s heading this way)? Is someone trying to ruin the clothing shop, or the guy who got thrown/jumped through the door, or is this kind of thing totally normal in this place/time? How/why did this attack (whether on the guy or the shop) happen in broad daylight when the shop is open?
By this time, I’m adding to my story ingredient pile, but checking to see what fits with what I already have, what’s missing, and/or what seems as if it would be particularly interesting. The school needs some interesting characters before things can progress much further. The shop clerk who’s ready to bill the incoming dude, on the other hand, feels like fun…which means I need to figure out why he/she is so blasé about people crashing through the door. Does this happen often, or is the clerk just the sort of person nothing ever phases? And I still don’t know who the dude is or why he crashed through the door… Maybe he’s escaping from someone? “Hide me!” “Door on the left, sir, that’ll be another mark, and don’t break it on your way through.”
Basically, I keep looking at what I want/need to know and trying out as many different possible options at random as I can think of until I find something I like that fits with what I already have. I’m adding ingredients to my flour bowl, and the more I add, the more it starts looking like the base for something specific – cookies, not biscuits. Once I know what kind of thing I’m making, I can stop looking at biscuit ingredients and focus more on cookie-dough stuff. Eventually, I get the key – “Oh, that’s what’s going on!” and it becomes a plan for a story instead of a pile of ingredients.
To extend the metaphor, I need to grease the pan and turn on the oven before I start actually mixing things together, or I’ll end up with an inedible uncooked mess. I need an idea of what’s going to end up on the cooling rack, and I can’t discover this by putting stuff into a bowl.
I only need a sketchy, skeletal plot, but it needs to be a whole plot, complete with middle and ending. Initial situations, cool setting bits, and interesting character-ideas are easy-peasy for me, but gathering them does not get me any forwarder. I envy the writers who get full-plots-with-endings for free, and I can get annoyed by the assumption that “mix enough stuff together, pile enough grief on your protagonist, and the ending will just fall into your lap!” is something that works for everyone.
I agree—I need the full plot, at least the main points. If I have that, a protagonist, and a first sentence, I can get baking.
I have to outline to a scene-by-scene level or the story will die on me.
It’s interesting how different ways of working can be. If I have that sort of foreknowledge of the story, it will die; writing becomes mere typing, a tedious chore. As I’ve said before, I write for the same reason I read—to see what happens next.
Gather all the ingredients, mix them together in the proper sequence and proportions, pour it into a pan, and put it into a pre-heated oven—and you still don’t have a cake or whatever.
You need to add time.
Having decided to add blueberries to my batter, I now have to decide to mix them in with the dry ingredients, to add them just before or just after the liquid, or to wait till the batter is blended and fold the berries in just before the cake goes into the oven. If it were a real cake, I’d know what to do. As it is, there are about four places where I could put a vital bit of backstory, and I can’t determine which one.
The advantage of ideas over ingredients is that you can indeed throw them in willy-nilly and then pull them out again.
This does tend to be in the early stages.
Maybe the best part of this post is the word that isn’t present, metaphor or no: “recipe.” As our hostess frequently says, there’s no recipe to follow to produce a quality novel. Gotta start mixing and tasting…
No one’s going to complain if your next batch of brownies is exactly the same sort of wonderful as the one before it.
Well, true, but…ever read Tarzan and the Leopard Men? 😉
No.
Do you need three guesses why I didn’t read that far into the series?
I read ’em all – but I was 12-13.
So, nope, don’t need any guesses. 😀
A glimmering of a theory as to why I have plot problems.
When I have a Cool Idea as a story-starter, I really don’t want it to become the Story Problem. It might be the Cool Solution to the problem, but I don’t want it to be the problem itself, and I really don’t want “Something goes wrong with Cool Idea” to be the problem. Instead, I need something else adjacent to be the problem.
So if the Cool Idea of the story is “Human Woman Goes Shopping For Clothes on an Alien World,” then the Story Problem can’t be “Something Goes Wrong with the shopping trip” (and it turned out to be “Finding a suitable thank-you gift for the alien woman who helped out” when I did that story). Or if I had “Mother taught me to be polite to dragons” as a starting idea, I really would not want to write a story about the protagonist facing difficulties in being polite. At worst, the Cool Idea can only be a minor subplot as far as the plotting goes, with a relatively easy and routineish solution and never enough tension to power a story by itself.
This sounds… familiar. “Something else adjacent to be the problem”, exactly.
To extend the cooking analogy, I need to temper the Cool Idea eggs to keep them from curdling when I add the hot story-problem.
I think my problem tends to be that I know what kind of thing I’m making, but don’t necessarily know what key ingredient will turn it from bowl-of-lumpy-flour-based-stuff to decisively-cookie-dough. Or maybe I do know, but for some reason chocolate chips are contra-indicated, I’ve already got raisins in another part of the meal, and I don’t like nuts. So I end up staring aimlessly around the kitchen, and occasionally explaining to some helpful soul that no, olives or tuna fish are really not where I’m going with this.
Also, great, now I’m hungry. 🙂
Having slept on the problem with the blueberries, I have decided that since I have a plurality of blueberries, I can sprinkle them in here and there. A bare mention in Chapter 10 of “the pirate attack five years ago”, the delivery of the possibly-still-damaged battlebots in Chapter 11, the history of why one of them has to be forcibly restrained from blowing itself up in Chapter 12, and then way down the road the next pirate attack, in which the bot either does or doesn’t finally blow up, depending on what I want when I get there.