Probably the most often-asked question writers get is “Where do you get your ideas?” Very few people ever ask “What do you do with your ideas once you have them?” though that seems to me to be the logical next step. It seems a good many people don’t realize that there is a lot of development work to be done in between having an idea and actually writing a story.
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.
I’m one of the unusual people for whom writing the idea down is not the first step. 🙂
In fact, I don’t usually write it down at all.
I’m currently taking part in an online plotting class with Judith Tarr (she’s also planning to offer ‘short stories for novelists’ and vice versa), and we had to develop a plot from scratch, so I learnt a thing or two about my process.
I have *never* deliberately set out to develop a story out of thin air – novelists don’t need many ideas, and I have more than I have time to write already – but it was gratifying to learn that I _can_. Usualky, I start with a character in a Situation and then cast around to see how they got there, who they are, and what happens next; this time I had to work at that, but I don’t think the end result is much different.
Your second method, on the other hand, is not something that would even have occurred to me as a possibility.
My first idea wanted to be a novel, so I patted it encouratingly and sent it to be the back of the queue. The second I thought might be a short story, and I certainly don’t want to try and maintain it at novel length (the POV charcter is a pond, so no visuals), but I’ll be damned if the thing didn’t grow tentacles everywhere. I now know the pond’s backstory, and the character’s backstory… what I still don’t have is the recognition of ‘this makes a short story arc’ I have the feeling that I will end up writing a lot of stuf before looking at it to extract the story: drawing the map before plotting the route, so to speak.
Since I’m using a similar process for the WIP, I feel comfortable with that (I’d prefer to have the story fully formed, thankyewverymuch), but it’s a lot of work for a short story.
Michelle – I don’t write most of my ideas down any more, either, because there are so many. I don’t NEED more ideas…and if I do, another one will be around in about ten minutes. But it’s often helpful when one is getting started writing (and you’ve been doing this almost as long as I have, I know, so that doesn’t apply to you). But off the top of my head, I’d say that most of the writers who are sit-down-and-surprise-myself types – the ones who don’t or can’t think much about a story in advance – are usually growing their stories from inside.
green_knight – Sounds fascinating. Maybe your pond story is an idea-and-mood piece more than one that has a traditional plot? Like the short stories that are excerpts from alien language phrase books or recipies, or the more literary ones that are descriptions of houses? It’s a lot easier to get that kind of pushing-the-edges experiment to work in a short form.
Pat,
it definitely wants to be a traditional short story in every other aspect, that was the whole point of the exercise for me.
I could easily write a novel in this world… but not with the Pond as POV character. (There’s not enough plot for a novel on the farm, and the pond refuses to travel.)
I was missing a fundamental fact about stories: no reset button, something needs to have changed. I think I’ve got it now – it remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to make the POV work and whether I can keep the blackberry thicket under control.
green_knight: That sounds fascinating. I’ve never thought of using a pond as the POV character. I would be interested to see how it turns out.
green_knight – Well, there is that school of thought that says there are only two stories: “Someone leaves home” and “A stranger comes to town.” If the pond won’t/can’t leave home, that leaves you with one alternative…
Nct2: trust me to pick a challenge. I have no idea how it will turn out. *I* am watching with interest.
Pat,
don’t give me ideas 🙂
I am trying to write a short story, you know. (It’s just as much work as writing a novel. Quicker to actually write, I suppose, but it needs just as much plotting.
Thank you for addressing this. 🙂 Based on what you’ve said, I think I’m actually on the right track, at least as far as it goes. I tend to do both of those. I have definitely thought to myself “maybe that’s what my character is missing” when engaged in another author’s story, even though I usually try to derive their personalities and lifestyles from the circumstances I’ve personally invented.
Since my thought process so far seems to correspond to the habits of “real” writers, I find that encouraging. But I think that sitting down to write is a thought constipating maneuver in my case, and I need to find a “creative space” where I can hammer out the design without either excessive pressure or distraction. I like the idea of a walk in the woods…
Jordan – Doing something where you can really relax is good – which is why so many writers get good ideas in the bath or shower, and/or keep a notepad and pen on their nightstands. But you may also be slightly off in your focus. If you already have a character, for instance, it’s certainly possible that drilling down more and more deeply into that character will result in finding out what you need to know to get the story going, but it’ll probably take quite a while. Thinking about what the story is missing, rather than what the character is missing and then poking around there is more likely to get you what you need. Unless, of course, I’m simply reading far too much into your example, which is perfectly possible. 😀
No, you are probably right. Developing a character is easier to me, I think, because I can draw much from personal experience and observation. Developing a story is where I get lost in the abundance of possibilities and disconnected elements, and therefore precisely where I need to plow ahead.
It’s brilliant to be able to discuss it with you, and just talking about writing helps me maintain the right frame of mind to keep working on it.