Stories grow from the ideas that bubble up from the depths of your imagination. So how do you capture and refine them into something useful?
This is a really interesting part of the creation process. To be honest and upfront, I have no understanding where my ideas come from, or what leads to that particular concept popping up in my mind. But I can discuss the activities that encourage ideation, and how I develop that initial idea into something useful.
I do know that you can increase the frequency of new ideas occurring to you, and increase the frequency of those that are worth keeping, if you treat it as a structured part of building your story. The ideation process is a door that opens up new parts of the plot, characterisation, or action within a scene. It often triggers a cascade of thoughts that lead to changes in how you think of characters or the story itself.
That’s really the first part of ideation. Don’t stop with your initial thought, but dig into it to discover the underlying detail. Let’s say you had an idea for a great scene. That would be good, but it’s possibly not reaching its full potential if you just capture the idea and move on.
To see where it could really go, and how it could be integrated into your story and affect the plot, try to discover the ‘why’ that sits behind the action. In this case, you want to understand what led to the chain of events described in the scene. So you ask yourself why each of the participants was in the scene, and what were they doing?
Once you’ve fleshed out that, you then ask why a second time. Why did the scene happen? What were the characters doing before the scene? You want to work out what led up to the interaction.
Then ask ‘why’ a third time to find out what the characters’ motivations or underlying drivers were that led to the actions that led to the scene. And if that raises more detail, keep asking questions until you’re satisfied you know the whole sequence of events that culminated in the scene. This is called the three whys approach.
This detailed approach works if you have a bigger, more interesting idea. Sometimes, however, something small occurs to you. It’s just a little idea—a small, discreet addition that enriches a character, scene, or concept but doesn’t change the story in any significant way. And that’s needed as well, so make sure you record it.
This ideation process is quite organic as you capture ideas for future stories—and these ideas may occur at any point and time—but it still needs some structure. The early approach is normally led by a rough idea I have that outlines what the next story focuses on.
I don’t necessarily know what’s going on inside the plot, such as rising or falling action, etc., but I usually know who’s in it and how it ends. I’m writing in a series, so I usually need a relatively defined end state to act as the foundation for the start of the story after that.
I find this lack of detail helpful at this point, as it helps you consider every idea, no matter how crazy. It also means that that idea for the climax can change shape and evolve as you explore the plot and add more detail. Don’t force yourself into a particular path if you begin to realise you don’t like the destination. But, whether or not that idea for the climax stays in the story, it gives me a starting point. Once again, I can’t really shed light onto how my subconscious joins a series of dots together to come up with an idea and then says to me “wouldn’t it be cool if…”, I’m just grateful that it does!
I help the ideation process by walking and talking. I’m a strong believer in the view that motion promotes creativity. I love nothing more than walking with Lianne, who co-authors the stories with me, and laying out an idea to her. We then push it backwards and forwards as we explore some of the connected concepts that flow out from that first point until we get something that we think has a little heft to it. A little weight. Something that is going to be good enough to include in the story. Then we capture it and move on to talk about the next idea.
This is really just brainstorming, and in brainstorming it’s important that you’re not too critical of your ideas. What you want to be doing is capturing them so you have a record. Later, you think through and assess the concepts’ value. That’s a different part of the process.
So ideating on a story begins with a high-level statement that describes the book concept. Then, over time, ideas come to me and I note them down, building up a file (or several) of bullet points.
I use the Notes app on my smartphone all the time for this. I usually give the note I use a title like Story idea and then I give it a tag (many apps use the # symbol in front of a word to generate tags) so I can search for all of the entries associated with my writing.
Each entry in the note usually starts with something like Book one idea, Book 2 idea, or Background so I have some rough idea of where the entry is meant to go. I don’t bother ordering them, or gathering them together at this point in time. While these are most often recorded using the speech-to-text transcription on my smartphone, I also use voice memo functionality to capture the ideas. This means I can walk along while dictating.
I usually make any corrections to the transcription at that point so I actually know what the entry is talking about – this is a big problem when you are using made-up names for technology, political groups, or people. Once it makes sense, I move on. Just make sure you provide enough detail so you understand what you were thinking about at that time. It’s surprisingly easy—and very frustrating—to look at a note and go “I have no idea what this is about.”
This stage of capturing ideas can last for a long time, as you never know when inspiration is going to strike. It could be for a book that’s several steps further into the series, or it could be for something that you’ve finished but not yet released. Creativity doesn’t like to be constrained! It can sometimes cause problems if you come up with a great idea that undoes some of the work you’ve already done, but this is easily one of the most fun periods in writing a book. You’re so free in what you can think of.
Once I start getting closer towards actually starting to write a book, I collect all of the different notes associated with that story – both text and audio – and bring them into my writing app. I use Scrivener, and put the ideas into a document in the project’s notes folder. I’ll talk about Scrivener more in a later blog post.
I’m still not sequencing the ideas to bring them into a plot at this point. Instead, I group them together by topic so I have all of the ideas associated with the protagonist, other characters, plot or subplot developments, and any other important topics in their own sections in the document. Then I do another pass on the content to remove or merge duplicates—entries that cover the same concept. This leaves me with a slimmed-down, organised group of ideas that might make it into the book.
The process of reviewing all of these collected ideas is really useful. I’ve often gathered these over the course of months or even years, and I might have completely forgotten about a thought. Not only does looking at these concepts refresh my memory, it can often spark new ideas. If that happens, I record those new thoughts in the same way as I do the others.
It’s a cliché about writers that they constantly scribble ideas in a notebook or its equivalent, but it’s now a habit for me to record the ideas anywhere I am: walking, writing on something else, or even waking up from sleeping. The important thing is to capture the ideas in a way that works for you, and don’t stress out about trying to integrate them into any grand story at this point. I’ll talk about that in the next blog in the series.
Footnotes
•The Theory of the 3 Whys, Jason Zook, 2015: https://www.inc.com/jason-surfrapp/the-theory-of-the-3-whys.html
•Scrivener: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-affiliate.html?fpr=will59
