Writing, in general, is a tough gig. Even if you’re the most gifted scribe, one of the many moving parts within your process occasionally breaks. If not, it will require the oil of consistent practice, the reinforcement of desire/ambition for what you want to do. In that vein, I’m going to start a series of posts on this Panda blog to talk a bit about the process writers go through.
Ideas
No novel, short story, script, novella, magazine article, or grocery note can be started without an idea. From the grocery note reminding you to pick up milk, to the story arc binding together a ten book series, all of it doesn’t go anywhere without the seed idea.
Lary Crews, an instructor of mine, taught of an idea generator that can be used for mystery novels, which of course can be used for other genres as well. Get a box, doesn’t need to be big. Collect writing pieces that interest you, newspaper (non-digital if you can find them), magazine articles, anything that has something of interest to you.
When ready to start a project, open that box and pull out your clippings and organize them, trying to find things that can be linked. From there, you’re building plot for your project. Organize a lot of things together and your plot may be a bit stronger. Organize groups and you may have sub-plots as well.
For example, in my upcoming Magehunter series, I have linked ideas from my love of reading fantasy books, drawn from news articles as well: A young boy, group of friends (co-workers), new technology (magic), moral authority, strong father figures. I took these ideas and moved them around a bit to find out how I wanted to fit them together
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Another way to generate ideas is the old favorite…BOLT out of the blue.
Knights of the Shield started as an assignment for an online writing course by the above mentioned, Lary Crews. The assignment was to write the first chapter of a mystery novel. What I wrote was okay, but really didn’t move anywhere, because I hadn’t taken the time to flesh out the entire idea. Before I could turn it in, I re-read it one more time and BLAMMO! Bolt out of the blue and everything about the story shifted. Other pieces began to fall into place and my characters took over and told me the story after that. Something I will get to in another post.
Ideas build plots, and a well-supported idea builds plot and sub-plots. There is a discussion among writers about which is more important in a book, plot or characters, and I firmly believe characters are the end-all and be all, but a good plot, from good ideas certainly doesn’t hurt.