Deep Lurker wanted to know what my ideas look like when I come up with them, specifically whether they’re just concepts or whether they have skeletal plots attached. Unsurprisingly, the answer is “It varies.” The slightly longer answer is “It varies A LOT.”
To give you a more specific idea of the range I’m talking about, Talking to Dragons started as just exactly that: the title and nothing else. At the other end, Snow White and Rose Red started with Terri Windling asking for an adult retelling of my favorite fairy tale, and me saying “I want ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ and I’m going to set it in Elizabethan England,” which certainly had a general plot attached (courtesy of the fairy tale and setting).
Every book is different. Every idea is different. Some come with plots attached, some don’t. Some are plots, and need characters and settings generated. It doesn’t really matter; what matters is whether the thing I come up with makes that spider-sense tingle, the one that tells me “I want to know more about this; I want to find out more about these people, this place, why and how this happened, what is going on.” When I say I can come up with five or six ideas in a couple of hours, I mean five or six that I want to write. I can come up with a whole lot more ideas than five or six, but most of them aren’t things I personally am interested in writing about. This is why I like plot-noodling for other people; it lets me generate lots of ideas that I feel no obligation to save or write about myself, that someone else can use.
The hard part is not really generating all this stuff; it’s forcing oneself to take the time to do the generating, and to make sure that what one has come up with is reasonably solid and interesting. Accepting the first character who auditions for the central role in your cool plot, or the first screenplay that comes along for your wonderful characters to play in…well, once in a while it works brilliantly, but you can’t depend on that. Most of the time, the first character who shows up turns out to be rather cardboardy and stereotypical, and the first plot either requires your wonderful characters to do things they simply wouldn’t do, or else is clichéd and doesn’t give them a chance to shine, or is full of holes.
Of course, some writers have a process that requires them to write something about their people or situation or idea in order to get it properly fleshed out. They have to write their way into their ideas, and while they grumble just as much as the rest of us when it all falls apart in the middle, their process almost requires them to write half a book or a hundred-and-fifty-page “draft zero” – it’s how they go about really digging into the idea, the situation, the characters, whatever the story-seed is. Once they’ve done that, then they can sit down and figure out the real story they want to write.
Me, I find it annoying to have to throw away seven or ten chapters and rewrite; I’d rather put the work in up front. How I do the work…well, let me come up with something and show you.
So what I came up with, after a couple of minutes, was “Girl unexpectedly inherits something magical.” The first thing I want to know is, “What is the magical thing?” I start thinking of physical objects: a cauldron of plenty? A cookbook of magical recipes? A magic carpet? A wishing ring? Aladdin’s lamp? Or maybe it’s an animal. Cats are the obvious first choice; too obvious. Dogs…no. Birds…birds? A mynah bird? Or maybe a parrot…African Grays are scarily intelligent even without magic being involved (as far as we know).
Next, who’s the girl? How old? I’m thinking mid-twenties, old enough to be out of college and on her own, and to have elderly relatives who could leave her something interesting without their deaths necessarily being a huge unexpected traumatic event (since that’s not the story I want to write; somebody else might make a different choice). But I feel no particular urge to write contemporary fantasy. So when is this happening? Is it even set in our world? I can see it going two ways: either as a “secret history” story set in real-life past, or in an alternate universe where magic is out in the open. Since I’m not sure which I like better, I’d normally noodle around with both of them for a while until one of them felt more interesting.
In this case, I’m imagining a large Victorian-style house, so I’ll go with AU Victorian-era. That makes me think of Dickens and Oliver Twist, which immediately changes my protagonist to a much younger person, early teens probably. So now I have an impoverished Victorian-era teenaged girl, and a potential plot (I could combine Oliver Twist and Bleak House for the inheritance part). I’m not happy with the Dickensian remake, though, so I look back at the other things I’ve considered. An impoverished Victorian girl inherits a magical African Gray parrot…what can it do for her? Where have I heard that question before? Puss in Boots…and there is the plot I want to start with.
I say “start with” because Puss in Boots will not transplant easily to the Victorian era, plus I don’t think my parrot is going to act quite like Puss. The plot will also change depending on the social setting and the magic, on who the girl inherited the parrot from and why, and a bunch of other things. Also, I can’t imagine that nobody knows the parrot is magical, so there are likely other people who are interested in getting their hands on it. Right now, everything is still pretty flexible – if something comes up that “feels right,” like the Victorian house and Oliver Twist, I’ll happily change everything else to fit, the same way my heroine went from being a post-college mid-twenties young woman to an impoverished young teenager.
All of this took me about half an hour, and it is a good solid story-seed. It still needs a lot of work and development before I’m ready to write – names for characters, more specifics about the background and backstory, more characters (each of whom will alter the potential plot, because each will have his/her own agenda), and a decision about the central story problem (is this fundamentally going to be rags-to-riches, or will it be finding out who killed the person who left her the parrot? And I didn’t know til I wrote that that it was murder, so things are still developing…). (And no, this isn’t what I’m currently working on. Maybe later.)
Coming up with a decent preliminary five-to-ten page plot summary from this will take me somewhere between two or three days and two or three months, depending on how much juice the idea has, how much time I have to really focus on the story and play with different possibilities, and normally I wouldn’t start writing until I have one (there have been exceptions to this – as I said, every book is different).
Thank you for answering my questions! (The ones you answered in previous posts, too, not just this one.)
With me, my ideas never have plots attached. They’re always cool settings, or cool initial situations, or more rarely cool characters, or very rarely a cool solution to a problem. Plot, for me, is hard hard hard. Hard to come up with the story problem, hard to figure out how the story problem grows more problematic, and hard to figure out how the characters finally resolve the story problem. So when I do get my hands on a plot, I cling to it desperately.
It would help if more of my ideas were of cool ways in which a character resolves a problem.
(Hmm, it just occurred to me that one of my problems is an impulse to slap my protagonist with the full awfulness of the story problem right at the start. “Dear Frodo, Here’s that ring I told you about. I’m too old for a real adventure now, so I’m leaving it to you to gather a few trusty friends, sneak into Mordor, and drop it into the volcano there. Don’t delay, or the Dark Lord will conquer the world and bring everything good to an end. Your loving uncle, Bilbo.”)
P.S. Handle it now! You are a grown-up now. Do not wait to have a mid-life crisis at 50 over it. And do not waste any time with Bombadil. Yes, he is great to spend a few, lazy days with, but this Ring business is important. I would skip that whole section. Love, B.
Actually, Bilbo ditched the whole problem in Chapter One, leaving Gandalf to dump it on Frodo in Chapter Two.
And come to think of it, for Tolkien — who was notoriously slow in getting started — that’s pretty early on. 🙂
I want to read that parrot story!
I’ve just started writing the sequel to my previous WIP, and I’m having trouble coming up with a real plot. I have a general concept (dual viewpoint, switching between the heroine trying to integrate two foreign comrades from the last book into her fighting troop and the hero settling into his new position as court mage) and some ideas of things that I want to have happen, but there isn’t really a central problem. It probably has something to do with the general antagonism toward the above-mentioned foreign comrades’ country, which is sending a diplomatic party to the heroine’s country after decades of enmity, but I haven’t yet been able to pin down exactly what.
Sometimes I find it helps to throw things together to see if they click. Some idea just don’t play nicely together, but sometimes two ideas merge so perfectly that they then crystallize the story about them as if they were a super-saturated solution.
I want to read the parrot story too….
I also want to read the parrot-and-Victorian-teenage-girl story. 😀
My first plots are usually pretty contrived. I have to keep bouncing the idea around for a few weeks before I come up with something that isn’t so cliche. I also would prefer to the work up front though, rather than throw away chapters that didn’t end up working. My latest idea is taking me forever to think through, simply because I’m putting all kinds of pressure on myself to make it “the one” that gets me an agent. Yay for procrastination!
It’s always so interesting to hear about your process.
Also, it still blows my mind that I can actually communicate with an author whose books profoundly changed the way I look at the world, and view storytelling.
Thanks for sharing, and dear god, please write this book eventually because I already need to know the African parrot’s favorite type of pudding and whether or not it yodels.
I think I’m one of those draft zero people. Only, it usually only takes me one-third of a manuscript to write my way in. 🙂 If the parrot tale is based on puss-in-boots, would the parrot get POV chapters? And why is he so much more popular in the comments than the heroine? Is it just because parrots look so much more pet-able (Proof that appearances are deceiving). Questions, questions…
And why is the parrot so much more popular in the comments than the heroine?
I think it’s not so much that he’s more popular, as that the parrot is the distinguishing feature of the story. Calling it “the Victorian-teenage-girl story” without mentioning the parrot tells you a lot less.
And because African Greys are *really* smart. Smarter than we know even in this universe, probably.
Ummm…. I know it hasn’t been decided who was murdered and left the girl the parrot. For future contemplation: Who was s/he? What occupation? How was the parrot involved in that occupation? Familiar? Catalyst? Gofer? Reincarnated instructor??
perhaps because in conjunction with Puss-In-Boots, it leads to the assumption that the parrot will be the mover and shaker in the story.
I suppose it could be the other way ’round. The girl could figure out how to introduce the parrot to high society.
Or instead of Puss in Boots, the plot might be The Frog Prince. Or some odd combination: The parrot has to arrange for the girl to achieve social success, puss-in-boots syle, in order to break the curse.
On a tangent: Is there a internet forum or site, somewhere, for exchanging plot & story ideas? Where people can contribute ideas that they’re not going to use themselves, and pick up ideas that they never would have thought of themselves?
Well, there used to be (and theoretically still is) the USENET site rec.arts.sf.composition, where a lot of us used to hang out and exchange ideas and information and suggestions in just that fashion. But a couple of people got onto it who wanted only to push their own, virulent, ultra-right-wing version of things, and most of the interesting people dropped out. I still look at it daily to see if anything’s there, but mostly there isn’t. And USENET itself is slowly going away, and most of the people who used to post have blogs now. This is the one I know about.
I also followed and posted to rasfc, and I don’t want to bring those disagreements here. Even if I am a virulent ultra-right-winger myself.
More to the point, rasfc wasn’t really a place for sharing and exchanging plot and story ideas. Not in the way I’m asking about. It did happen sometimes, but at its best, it was more a place for therapeutic whining about plot problems, happy dances of rodents when celebrations were called for, and threads like the ones on this blog.
And pun cascades.
This was interesting – and reassuring – to read. That’s pretty much how I go about dreaming up ideas. It’s reassuring because I have previously lacked confidence to follow through on what I dream up, but this makes me think, my beginnings aren’t so off course after all.