Developing ideas

A couple of weeks back, Rachel asked this:

I was wondering how you work with and extend story ideas without getting bored? Because I have a habit of writing or imagining “moments” that really interest me, certain people or situations that last a page or two, but when I try to extend the idea to a full story I almost immediately become bored with it.

When a would-be writer has this problem, there are a couple of possible reasons, and what you do about it depends on which reason fits your particular situation.

One possibility – which is actually fairly common – is that the would-be writer has failed to recognize that no job is 100% fun, 24/7. There are always going to be parts of producing a story that just have to be slogged through, and unfortunately for these writers, their “it’s not fun” part has shown up at the very start of the process. (The most common “This is not fun” part is probably the Miserable Middle, but plenty of writers have trouble getting started, finishing, plotting, or doing revisions. But it’s always something.) The only thing one can do about it is slog through the sloggy bits. However, it is frequently a good idea to test out some of the other possibilities first.

For instance, the writer may be a seat-of-the-pants writer who is trying to write like a planner. If the writer is one of those who has to keep surprising themselves in order to stay interested, planning out a plot arc is not going to work very well. A sub-set of this includes those writers who are “tell it once” types – once they have written the story, they totally lose interest … and writing a plot outline in advance counts as “writing the story” as far as their backbrain is concerned. In this case, the thing to try is obviously to sit down and write with as little advance planning as possible, and with total mental permission to change “what happens next” the minute the writer gets even a faint whiff of boredom.

A variation on this is the planner who is trying to work like a pantser. Occasionally, I run across people who have come up with a situation or a character that they love, and they can get the initial inspired idea down with very little planning or effort. It just comes. They expect the rest of the story to show up the same way, and when it doesn’t, they give up. They fail to realize that inspiration is undependable for nearly all writers, and what they really need to do is some development. And if development is the boring, annoying part of the process, try to keep the focus on what would be fun for you to write in more detail.

Another possibility is that the writer is trying to develop the story in a way that doesn’t fit their process. These are most frequently the character-centered writers who think they need to start with an action plot, but sometimes they’re plot-centered writers who stall because they’ve internalized the advice that “you have to start by figuring out what the character wants.” And yes, eventually the character-centered writers will need a plot (but it needn’t be action-centered; it’s far more likely to be emotion-centered or character-centered), and the plot-centered writers will need characters with goals (but they may not figure out what the character wants until they’ve written most or all of the story).

The next thing I can think of is that the writer is trying to make a short-story-sized idea into a novel. This really only works when a) the short story version is incredibly dense, and benefits from being unpacked and developed, b) the short story/incident is the beginning of a much longer potential tale, or c) the idea/story is one of the ones that can swing either way, as a tightly focused short story or as a more wide-view novel. It is often very difficult for a beginning writer to tell whether a particular idea is well suited to a particular length. Before I got published, I wrote a number of “short stories” that kept getting rejections with comments like “This sounds like the plot outline for a novel” or “This sounds like Chapter 3 of a novel.” Now I can see that those editors were right; those stories were all novel-sized ideas crammed into short-story word counts. Trying to stretch a short-sized idea into a novel’s worth of word count is equally problematic.

It is also possible that the writer is intimidated by the idea of writing something that is as long/formal/professional/real as an actual story. Writing snippets about incidents and quirky characters is fine; nobody is going to tell them that they should have done something else, or that what they have written isn’t good enough, because it’s obviously not supposed to be a short story or a novel. Writing something that can be labeled “short fiction” or “a novel” is frightening because it comes with so many “requirements” – structure, pace, plot, style, voice… It gets overwhelming, so the writer falls back on things they’re sure will work, which are usually much too familiar and predictable to be fun and interesting to write. Or they feel like writing a “real” story/novel is so important that they can’t bear the thought of getting it “wrong” on the first try … so they stall out before they really get started.

For most of these, the first step is to stop and think about what attracts the writer to the ideas, characters, situations, and incidents they’ve managed to write. Is it making up cool twists? The characters? Surprising themselves? The answer may be different for each scenelet, but if there are enough of them, patterns will show up. Check out alternate processes – pantsing, if you’ve been planning, or planning, if you’ve been winging it.

Then pick one of your scenes and extend the part that is fun for you to write. Ask yourself what the coolest thing you can think of that could happen to one or both of these characters next, or what the coolest, most fun thing to write about next would be. Have ninjas jump through the window, or a long-lost lover, and see what happens. Or if you like writing dialog, who could show up that would be interesting for one or the other to talk to? Or totally switch it up – do the next bit as a series of letters, or from the viewpoint of the pet parakeet, or a white rabbit with a pocket watch.

If you can’t extend forward, try going backward – what happened to bring these characters to this interesting moment? Or see if two or three of your ideas can combine into something larger than either. Maybe that scene where the college professor is having a midlife crisis can tie in with the one where the fairy princess attends her first rock concert, because they’re both happening at the same college.

In either case, don’t worry about what kind of thing you’re writing or whether it’s sellable. Focus on having fun. If the writer is having a total blast, odds are that the readers will, too.