Every story starts with an idea. Not all ideas become stories, but all stories stem from an initial concept.
The original idea can come from many angles. For my thesis, I started with a character: a woman working in the male-dominated industry of motorsports. (Insider baseball: when I first started building the character web that became this novel way back in 2010, my original idea centered on Alexis and her relationship with her now ex fiancé.) For Baggage, I started with an opening image: my main character sprawled out on the floor under her desk at work having a panic attack, wondering how the hell this became her life. My Fortitude zombie novella series started with a question: what would a huge metropolitan be like after a zombie apocalypse?
The Woodshed came to me from a setting. I have always been interested in mystery and thriller stories and love to read in the genre, but I hadn’t been planning to write in it for a while. My goal was to work on speculative fiction next. I have several sci-fi and fantasy series sitting in my filing cabinet, waiting for attention. But on vacation in Hayesville, North Carolina, we stayed at an AirBNB that had an old woodshed on the property, complete with dark shadows in the corners filled with cobwebs. One look at the atmosphere and the setting and I thought, ‘This would be a wicked cool place to murder my husband.’ And since I’d been on a Cabin in the Woods kick since Halloween, I twisted it to make a slasher-comedy. Whether The Woodshed becomes my next project remains to be seen. There’s plenty of time for another story to take over my brain before I get to it.
Some writers always start with a premise. Others with a character. I allow my brain to do what it wants to do and start where it wants to start. As long as the gears are cranking, I’m happy. Each story is unique, so the entry point for each should be as well. I end up focusing on the story that I can’t get out of my brain. Some are more persistent than others and demand attention. The first draft for my thesis I started back in 2013, but I had to work on my craft and hone what I wanted that story to be before I could pick it up again. Baggage, on the other hand, came to me much quicker. The world developed around Ainsley faster than I could’ve imagined. Of all the story ideas I thought I was going to work on next, this was at the tail end of the list. But Ainsley refused to be ignored. So here I am.
I always start with the initial idea and snowflake method off of it. Can I build a character web to fit a premise? Can I build a plot around the idea for one character? I spend a while playing in the sandbox of the story ideas.
My filing cabinet and computer are full of different story sparks that I’m still working to flush out, and my phone is full of ideas that will probably never amount to a story but are worth hanging onto for future inspiration.
The lesson I’ve learned is to never get rid of old story ideas. Just because an idea isn’t fit to be a story itself, doesn’t mean that later down the road it won’t become useful. I often take different story ideas and weave them together into something that could become a fully fledged novel. Or take scenes or ideas that didn’t work for one story and putting them into another one.
Each story idea gets its own project file in Scrivener. I allow myself to dump every single idea I have for it in the R&D folder in the project. Once I’m ready to come back to that story and work on it as my main project, I can then organize all the ideas as I build my characters and my plot.
Image by Rahul
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