ideas

One of the most basic and common questions a writer gets is ?how do you come up with ideas’ or ?how do you write a story,’ both of which are almost koan-like in their complex simplicity. While some folks see margin in making the writing process extremely complicated and filled with jargon and mystery, it really isn’t that hard. In fact, I’m going to show you how to write a story right now. If you’ve never written a story ever, this is for you.

One disclaimer: The story you write may not be a good story. And finishing it is up to you. But using this incredible secret, anyone—literally anyone—can write a story. Here goes.

Step 1: Imagine a Scenario

Start with any sort of scenario. It could be a Half-Dog, Half-Man Warrior in the depths of space trapped on a spaceship rapidly leaking oxygen, or it could be an old man weeding his garden on the last morning of his life. Or anything, really. Just imagine a scene. Crib something from your own life if you can’t drum up something purely imaginary.

Step 2: Imagine Something Unexpected

Next, ask yourself what the people in your scenario expect to happen. The Half-Dog Warrior might expect to die. The old man might expect to have breakfast in a few minutes, once he’s done with his gardening. Then, make something else happen. Something unexpected. The Half-Dog Warrior suddenly picks up a distress call. The old man sees Death, a corporeal hooded figure, lounging in a lawn chair across the street, waving.

Now, imagine how the character reacts to something unexpected. There’s your story.

Step 3: End the Damn Thing

Ending it can be hard, but only if you insist on a clever, or mind-blowing ending. If you decide you just need to end it, it’s easy. Do that. Clever or mind-blowing tends to happen when you’re not looking, so by pursuing endings of any kind you’ll wind up with finished stories, some portion of which will be brilliant in their endings.

The Half-Dog Warrior breaths his last bit of air as the young puppy he rescued speeds off in the ersatz escape pod he fashioned. The old man invites Death in for tea, and Death, startled, decides to spare him. Whatever. The Warrior flies into a star just to see what it’s like, or crosses the Event Horizon of a Black Hole to experience eternity in a moment. The Old Man sets his house on fire in his last excruciating moments, out of simple bitter rage. Whatever.

See? Stories are easy. The hard part is actually writing them down.

A writer acquaintance I meet for drinks once in a while is very critical of new TV shows, films, or novels; he’s really hard to please, and believes pretty strongly that there are, in fact, bad ideas for stories. I’ll mention a new movie coming out, for example, and he’ll complain that the premise has been done and it’s always terrible, so why would this new effort be any different?

Me, I believe firmly that there really aren’t any bad ideas. There are just bad executions of ideas. I think you can take any premise or plot twist or idea and create something amazing with it, as long as you take the right approach. The difficulty level is, of course, figuring out what that approach should be.

Worth It

I also believe that even failures teach us something. You have an idea for a book, you work on it, and in the end you have a steaming turd that you know you can’t show to anybody. A waste of time? I don’t think so.

Last year I wrote a novel that was inspired by some mainstream thrillers I’d read that had a Lost-style speculative twist. In other words, they were gritty thrillers, but had some kind of fantastic element to them. So I thought, heck, I can do that, and proceeded to write a novel using those stories as a template of sorts.

Well, I wrote a novel. And I was chatting with my agent and I mentioned the premise, and the first thing she said was “Well, as long as the twist isn’t XXX!” and then she laughed at how ridiculous such a twist would be. And yes, of course the twist in my story was precisely that.

So, I went home and stewed on this. I still liked a lot of the book, but even though it was just one person’s opinion, my agent’s opinion carried a lot of weight with me for obvious reasons, so I decided to revise. I still liked the idea—it wasn’t bad—but the execution was off. I kept the first twenty chapters or so and came up with an all-new twist, an all-new explanation for what was going on, and I wrote a whole new version of the second half of the book.

And yes, that second version was also: Bad.

The idea? Still a good one. I may take a third whack at it. Or it might find its way into a different book. Because there really aren’t bad ideas. There are just failed attempts at them. Unlike whiskey, which, let me tell you—there is bad whiskey out there, and it will change your life.

Man, ideas are hard. Not only are they hard to come by (good ones, at least), they’re also often hard to convey to other people in ways that capture the excitement and originality of the concept. And one of the worst experiences that every writer goes through is when they excitedly start explaining their new story or novel idea to someone and watch in horror as the other person’s eyes glaze over and your idea shrivels up, turns black, and dies.

I always think of the experience as Deflation: You start off all puffed up about your idea, then experience the slow deflation of that confidence and excitement, and walk away with your confidence zeroed out. It’s kind of awful. And there are two ways to deal with it, both of which are more or less prophylactic.

The Best Defense

First of all, the best way to avoid deflation is to avoid telling people about your story until you’ve written a draft. That’s not always easy, but if you shield your idea from deflation you can maintain your enthusiasm for it, and even increase it as you progress and feel better and better about what you’re pulling off. Does this mean you might waste your time on an idea that only seems great? Sure, that’ll happen—you’ll spend a year writing a novel draft only to realize that it was all shit from the very beginning. On the other hand, I think that scenario will be pretty uncommon. Much more likely is the scenario where you actually finish a book before people start tearing your ideas to shreds—because criticizing someone else’s book is so easy literally anyone can do it.

The other approach is to hone your Elevator Pitch way, way early. Normally writers don’t think too hard about how to sell their novels until they’re, you know, actively trying to sell it. That means that when you drunkenly announce that you’re working on a new book and start telling people about it, you don’t have a polished pitch, and you start to ramble like your Drunk Uncles at Thanksgiving. You will be actively smothering the life out of your idea as you go.

Instead, having a pithy couple of sentences that efficiently lay out the main ideas without a lot of unnecessary and potentially confusing details will let you get in and out without self-inflicted damage. It’ll also boost your confidence, because instead of getting mixed-up and confused about your own plot elements, you’ll already have the blurb ready to go.

These strategies won’t eliminate the dreaded unimpressed expression even your best friends will sometimes sport when you’re explaining your cool new SFF concept—but it will help. Does this mean you’ll probably write more bad books? Sure. In the words of Twisted Sister, that’s the price you gotta pay.

Creativity is a funny thing. Sometimes it comes at you fast and furious and you can’t possibly write fast enough to capture all of your ideas, and you wind up with a series of word processing files on your hard drive, each containing a single mysterious sentence that was once a flaming idea in your head. And then, just as quickly, you find yourself staring at a page, uncertain what happens next or if it’s even worth grinding through this chapter. Why not just set the house on fire and start over under a new name somewhere? Easier than finishing this terrible novel you’re writing.

To jump-start your creativity, you sometimes have to challenge yourself. The brain can get bored with doing things the same way all the time, and our obsessions sometimes guide us into writing about the same things over and over again, just dressed up with new plots and characters.

One thing I try, usually in my short fiction, is to put down a marker. By that I mean I’ll sometimes start a short story with a premise requiring a solution—with zero idea of how to solve it. Then you shout CHALLENGE ACCEPTED and set off to figure it out.

Challenge … Accepted?

This works best with mysteries of some sort. An example would be a locked-room mystery story: A victim is found in a room with one door, locked from the inside in a way that couldn’t be done from outside. They’ve been stabbed, but there’s no blood in the body! How in the world was this crime committed?

I have no idea. I just made that up. And it’ll be one hell of a solution … if I can find it.

I often fail at these challenges. Just because you set down a marker doesn’t mean you’re going to win. But it forces your brain to churn, and as you circle the problem you’re going to find compartments within yourself you weren’t even aware of. And every now and then, you DO solve the puzzle and wind up with a really amazing premise for a story that’s either perfect as-is or the basis of a genius novel. Either way, you win.

Every writer struggles with ideas sometimes. A lot of writers work on a specific idea for a long time, something that’s haunted and inspired them for years, and when they finally finish they have no idea what else to work on. Some writers just hit a wall and no new ideas inspire them. Call it Writer’s Block if you want (though I’d argue Writer’s Block doesn’t exist as a single affliction, but is instead a collection of problems writers run into), but whatever it’s called it’s distressing. Writers deal in ideas, after all, and if you’ve got no ideas you’re in deep trouble.

Relax, it happens to everyone. The longest I’ve ever gone feeling like every idea I had was terrible as a few months when I was a much younger man—for a while every single thing I wrote seemed stupid and trite. I did keep writing, though, because step one of working through a lack of ideas is to keep grinding. Work with what you have, even if what you have are lame retreads of overused tropes and half-baked concepts that fall apart when you work at them.

And if you’re going to say you literally have no ideas, I don’t believe you. Because like Seinfeld once said: That’s a show.

And the Show Must Go On

Seinfeld of course used that line when it was explaining the concept of a “show about nothing.” But the key mechanic applies to any writer struggling with ideas: Just think about what you did today, or yesterday, or last week. That’s a story. Or it could be—if nothing else, it’s the beginning of a story. If John Updike can write a classic about shopping at the A&P, why can’t you write a story about your trip to the Post Office, or your day at the museum, or how you would solve the rush hour traffic problem if you had the power to set people on fire with your mind.

Sorry, I already wrote that last one: Watch the World Die.

The point is, sometimes we can be a bit too precious about our ideas, demanding that they be absolutely amazing and unique and tremendous from the get-go. The truth is, ideas are rarely amazeballs from the moment you have them. To paraphrase Don Draper, that’s what the writing is for, to take a modest idea and make it amazeballs.

Speaking of Don Draper, it’s time for a drink. It doesn’t matter when you’re reading this, exactly, chances are I’m pouring myself one right now.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that all authors steal from each other. That’s art, really; you build on what’s gone before, chronicling the changes in society and human understanding by taking a work and playing with it from your own unique perspective. It’s only stealing if you don’t transform it somehow, if you don’t add to it.

That’s writing 101: Good writer’s steal. The thing is, the first stage of transforming something into your own unique work is very similar to simply ripping someone off.

The Green-Eyed Monster

The creative process is 99% driven by jealousy. The other 1% is a combination of things, including greed, the pure joy of creativity, and fear of monsters, but mostly it’s jealousy. Writers are the most jealous creatures in the world. Publish a book to acclaim? We hate you, because our books are smarter. Publish a book to great sales? We hate you, because people clearly lack the taste and wisdom to choose our books over yours. Writers may smile when they shake your hand, but we are black holes of hatred and jealousy.

When we read a book that’s really, really good—or really, really popular, or, god help us, both—we instantly start mining it for bits we can steal. And if the book really grabs us as something great, our first attempts at replicating it will be very, very close to simply ripping the book off.

And that’s okay.

Writing a pastiche of something else is a great way to figure out its secrets. Writing a story that is essentially someone else’s story with a few flourishes is like taking an engine apart and then putting it back together to learn how it works. At the end, you’ll have a small pile of parts left over—mysterious and ominous. But the engine, maybe, still runs despite that. It’s mysterious, but when that happens, you’ve taken your first step to owning the ideas and making them your own.

You keep taking it apart and putting it back together again. Parts get left over. If the story still runs, you put in new parts of your own to replace them. Repeat. Eventually, you’ve got a story that hums and purrs and there’s so many of your parts in there it’s no longer something you ripped off, it’s something you transformed.

That’s how it’s done. Although, please don’t take the word “parts” too literally.

Ideas are funny things. They come at random moments, and often prove to be so fragile they melt away the moment you take a good, hard look at them. While ideas aren’t worth much by themselves, they are the spark that can ignite the writing kindling and turn into a novel, so they’re kind of necessary. But anyone who’s tried to write a novel knows that ideas can be difficult to control—they’re slippery, and often prove more elusive than you’d like.

I’m not the first person to think of this, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true: The best thing to do with an idea for a novel is to forget it immediately.

What Was I Saying?

It seems a little crazy at first, but it works, trust me. Your first instinct when you have what you think is a great idea is to capture it, to nail it down. If you don’t make some notes, you’ll lose it.

What happens then? Well, you work on it, develop it, and eventually—whether days or weeks or years later—you realize whether or not it’s really worth your time. And if it isn’t worth your time, then all that effort you just sank into it was a waste.

What I’ve found to be true is that instead of trying to capture that idea, you should immediately try to forget it. Just put it out of your mind. Inevitably, the ideas that have real power behind them—the ideas that have the potential to be great books—will come back to you. A week, a month, a year later they’ll be triggered and you’ll remember them. What seems to happen in the mean time is that your subconscious continues to work on the idea, developing it and strengthening it. If the idea doesn’t come back to you, it very likely wasn’t worth your time.

I don’t have anything scientific to put behind this. In my experience when I jump on an idea immediately in a surfeit of enthusiasm, it usually goes nowhere. When I put it out of mind and it returns, it works.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a heavy day of forgetting things and drinking beer to get back to.