Exploring the Craft

3 Steps to Turn Ideas into Stories

Don’t dwell on searching for something perfectly original. You’re unlikely to find it, and if you do, it may be too unfamiliar for editors and readers if you want to sell the story.

I’ve heard some authors say they can turn any idea into a story. Not always a great story, but a workable, fully functional solid story. How do they do it?

The Work Begins

I wrote earlier about finding ideas, or at least, priming our brains to make connections to discover ideas. These raw ideas aren’t usually enough to turn directly into stories. They may be a what-if, an interesting character, a situation, or a setting. We might immediately connect some of these like a character and a situation. A good start, but even for a short story, we need something more. Something has to happen; a realization made; some change in the situation or the character.

Then there’s the process to reveal the change. A beginning, middle, and end. Even in non-traditional, non-Western story structures there’s an entry into the story, things happen, and an exit. Maybe in three parts, five, seven, or a serial structure. Stories also have a tone, a voice beyond character voice.

“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.”

― Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

Photo by Jack B on Unsplash

So how do we find the story? Personally, I have to build the story. I rarely find it.* 

 3 steps to build a story framework

My process is to write these down on a piece of paper or into a note-taking app. I am less successful entering ideas directly into my drafting document.

1. Take inventory and ask: 
  • Is there a character? The story has to involve someone or something with recognizable human needs, wants, desires, goals. An alien protagonist in a science fiction story has to share some traits with readers if the story is to be comprehensible, even if many of the characters traits are, well, alien.
  • Is there a setting? Where will the story take place? My early drafts are often just dialogue in empty space, but I do have a rough idea where the characters are. I just haven’t taken the time in early drafts to work out the details.
  • Is there a situation? A problem the character must solve? This could be internal like wanting to change something about themselves, or external with an antagonist or force of nature. The more I read and write, the more I’m leaning away from the idea that stories must have conflict and into the idea stories need tension. This allows me to explore many types of conflict that result in tension, which is what keeps the reader reading, and less on the form of the conflict itself. I’ll delve into this in a future post.
2. Iterate

For me, this is where my best stories have come from. Once the questions in #1 have answers, I go back and answer them again. I Look for deeper, less obvious answers. My first answer is likely close to a cliché, if not actually one. I iterate through this several times until I feel my story has unique or at least an interesting, uncommon take. Don’t dwell on this searching for something perfectly original. You’re unlikely to find it, and if you do, it may be too unfamiliar for editors and readers if you want to sell the story.

3. Build Structure

From those base elements, I build the story’s structure. I’ll also look at structure in a series of posts because entire books exist on the subject. For now, all we need to get started are: an entry point into the story, an idea of what achieves the end of the story, and that exit from the story.

  • I find even if I think I have a beginning; I need the ending next. I need to know where/how to leave the story. Once I have that, I may revisit the beginning. I like stories where the end echoes the start. That’s not universal, but does often make for a satisfying ending.
  • When I know the beginning and ending, figuring out what happens starts with taking an understanding of my character(s) and checking how they would genuinely react to the situation, and in context with the setting. I note a general list of events or actions that need to happen between the start and end. This may not hold up once the drafting starts, but it can be enough to have the confidence to start.

Time to draft

At this point I have enough to draft. It may be all I need for a short story. Novels take additional work. Additional ideas, settings and characters, iterated through these steps and questions for as much breadth and depth as the novel needs.

Whether plotting or writing into the dark or a hybrid of both, having these basic elements defined helps keep us on track. Completing a full draft is often the most troublesome part of writing, especially for new writers. I think you’ll find using this process you can produce a draft you can work with through revisions. Revising is also a topic for another day, but go forth. Conjure ideas and write a first draft.


*Okay, full disclosure. I’ve had instances where all the elements of a story came into my mind at once. My brain made all the connections for beginning, middle, and end. The character, setting, and central conflict or tension were there at once. The mind can operate in amazing ways. But this is rare. Expecting it to happen is like expecting perfect weather every day for a two-week vacation in New England. It could happen, but it’s highly unlikely.


Kevin Fellows
Kevin Fellows

I’m a poet and author of fantasy and speculative fiction. My debut novel At the End of the World is available now. You can find my poetry in the Star*Line Summer 2020 issue, and at Free Verse Revolution.


Exploring the Craft

The Idea of the Writer in Isolation is a Myth

Writing sheds are great but human engagement is better

This is the third in my series on SFF writing craft.

This isn’t the post I planned to write next in this series, but a recent Twitter dust-up got me thinking about my previous post and my next. Finding story ideas demands time and turning them into stories takes energy. We must also allow our minds to wander. But how much time do we need for all this? And once we begin our work, do we need long stretches of isolation?

The Twitter conversation I mentioned started here. I won’t go into details, but basically, there’s a long-held belief that artists and writers must work in long stretches of uninterrupted time and shouldn’t be bothered to participate in basic life activities like shopping, or child-rearing. The article delves into the privilege wrapped into that belief.

On a practical level, yes, we need mental space and mental time to create. It is important to establish a writing routine and habits that signal to others we are in writing mode. But that is not always physical space or linear time. Do we need a dedicated writing shed where we disappear and our partner slips meals under the door? No.

Photo by Dan Ritson on Unsplash

I know a writer who wore a special sweater to signify to her partner that she was in writing mode because their apartment was too small for her to have an office. I know multiple authors who wrote entire novels on trains during their commutes.

I wrote much of my first novel while on walks during my day job lunch hour. I found deep insights into theme and character during revision periods that came not while sitting at the keyboard but in flashes while doing something else like the dishes.

What we need as writers are inspiration, insight, and flow-state. None of those things equate directly to time or isolation. They can benefit from both, but are not required. We tend our garden of inspiration by consuming other works of art and information. Our insights will come when we allow our minds to play, rest, and focus on things that aren’t writing. Multi-tasking is a myth, there’s only time-slicing. We can achieve flow-state by avoiding time-slicing. We must make the best use of whatever time we have to put words on a page. Work better, not harder or longer.

Whether online or in-person, human interaction fuels stories, both in terms of ideas and in the execution.

Photo by Rajiv Perera on Unsplash

Fiction writers need to participate in our families, friend circles, and communities. Whether online or in-person, human interaction fuels stories, both in terms of ideas and in the execution. How else do we inhabit characters different from ourselves, who have a range of experiences, and react to situations, stress, and relationships in believable ways? Writing is a solitary activity, but productive writers cannot live in isolation.

I suspect this lack of engagement is why so many Great Dead Authors wrote books about writers. They only knew themselves, and even then, they didn’t have the insight they believed.

<a href="https://kevinjfellows.com">Kevin Fellows</a>
Kevin Fellows

I’m a poet and author of fantasy and speculative fiction. My debut novel At the End of the World is available now. You can find my poetry in the Star*Line Summer 2020 issue, and at Free Verse Revolution.


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Exploring the Craft

Exploring the Craft: 10 Ways to Generate Ideas

Part three of the Exploring the Craft: Writing SFF Fiction

Affiliate Links

I’m an affiliate for Bookshop.org. The links to recommended books are affiliate links. I own each of the books recommended in this series.

Photo by Jason Strull on Unsplash

Published authors seem to hate being asked where they get their ideas. I also hear beginning writers, or those thinking about writing, ask where they can find original ideas because everything has been done.

Well, everything hasn’t been done. The idea there are only 6 stories or 12 stories or whatever the clickbait headline of the moment says is just misleading. What those statements are talking about are archetypes, not ideas. And even that isn’t entirely right, because they’re only talking about Western archetypes.

I digress. Story ideas, particularly SFF ideas, are endless. How to turn an idea into a story is a topic for later. Today I just want to share ways to find ideas we can work with to generate stories.

The secret is Consuming

I don’t know the science behind this, but know how my mind works, and I suspect yours works similarly. We form ideas from inputs. Our brains make connections between stimuli: memories, visual, auditory, and olfactory cues. I can hear someone say, ‘my brain isn’t imaginative like that.’ But it can be. We can train our minds to make more connections, and with practice, better ones in terms of story. But first, we need the stimuli.

Ten ways to prime our brains to spawn ideas

Photo by Dmitry Schemelev on Unsplash
  1. Read books. Fiction, non-fiction, memoir, poetry, comics, anything. 
  2. Watch a TV series, particularly one lauded for story-telling, but more importantly one you think you’ll enjoy. Just watch for entertainment.
  3. Watch a documentary. Whatever subjects interest you.
  4. Watch a movie you know well. This time, don’t watch for the entertainment (What happens next? Will they, won’t they?) but look for things like characterization, the what-ifs beyond the story, the settings, and the costumes. If you’ve watched the movie several times, watching it again allows you to focus on details that add to the story.
  5. Play a video game. It doesn’t have to be an RPG. First-person shooters can let your mind do things in the background.
  6. Take a walk. Fresh air boosts creativity, providing visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli. I listen to podcasts when I walk. They don’t have to be about writing. Facts about the world, history, or science all feed my mind. 
  7. Take a shower. Sometimes doing nothing is most productive. It’s often when we’re distracted when we make connections.
  8. Call an old friend and have a conversation about anything.
  9. Have memorable experiences. I don’t call it a bucket list, just an, I want to do this list. Kayak, climb mountains, and when we can again, stroll an unfamiliar downtown and try new foods.
  10. Play What-if. Brainstorm what-if ideas without thinking about if you can turn them into stories. Just play. Play is an important element in creativity. I’ll recommend another book here, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter.

Make some of these a habit. When we keep our minds full of diverse topics, the synapses fire. Two or three unrelated things come together in our subconscious mind and produce an idea that might work in a story.

Examples

Here’s an example from a recent experience I had with a piece of collaborative software. Artificial Intelligence powered the software. It regularly provided prompts based on reading emails I wrote. These were so annoying I ignored them. When the same AI noticed I wasn’t opening the prompts, it asked if they were spam. I responded, yes. The AI was now marking its own communications as spam. Glorious.

I had an idea for a story, but I didn’t know it yet. It took one more nudge to get my mind to produce the idea. One of my walking podcasts mentioned AI in the context of helping writers. The full story idea immediately surfaced in my mind. The same day, I wrote a story about a collaborative AI and gamification gone to the extreme.

Another recent example. I went to South Korea for work six years ago. Nothing about this experience ever showed up as a story idea. Until this week, with the news of scientists creating hybrid monkey and human embryos. That triggered an idea I’m still mulling.

There’s no telling what our minds will connect or when to generate the spark of an idea. But for that process to work, we need to keep our minds full of a wide variety of things. We need to experience things. And often, when we try the hardest, we struggle to find ideas. It’s when we stop looking and focus on something else, our minds can get to work in the idea factory.

Next

In the next few posts, I’ll look at ways to turn raw ideas into stories.

<a href="https://kevinjfellows.com">Kevin Fellows</a>
Kevin Fellows

I’m a poet and author of fantasy and speculative fiction. My debut novel At the End of the World is available now. You can find my poetry in the Star*Line Summer 2020 issue, and at Free Verse Revolution.


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Exploring the Craft

Exploring the Craft: Reading for better writing

Click here for the previous article in this series, or here for all articles.

Affiliate Disclaimer

I am an affiliate for Bookshop.org and Bookshop links are affiliate links. That said, these are books I’ve read and will attest to being genuinely helpful to me.

Can you read your way to better writing through craft books?

I’m a bit of a writing craft junkie. I started collecting books about writing a few decades ago when I was first interested in becoming an author. Natalie Goldberg and John Gardner were my go-tos. But life got in the way, and for several years I wrote little and read less about writing.

Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer

That changed when I picked up Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer. Published in 2009, it was quite prescient and covers all the avenues of publishing available today. But it wasn’t the advice on publishing that grabbed me as much as the advice on writing a novel. Much of it was both a kick in the pants and a pep-talk into adopting the mindset of a professional author.

 I was concerned much of it might be outdated for 2021. However, reading through it again for this article, most of it still applies. Booklife is not so much a craft book as it is a how-to-manual for being a professional writer. It inspired me like no other book on writing and still does.

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

Another book, more craft focused but also covers all aspects of writing fiction, is Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Ned Stuckey-French. Not only is it comprehensive, but it’s deep. There are real examples taken from all forms of fiction to illustrate the authors’ points. I refer to this book with every book I write, and I always seem to find something new that sticks with me.

The Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

A terrific book, especially for beginners, is also by Jeff VanderMeer. It’s called The Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. Aimed at Speculative and Fantasy writers, this is a rich book with explanations, illustrations, essays by prominent writers in the field, and exercises. I recommend the print edition as the illustrations don’t work as well in ebook form. If you are relatively new to the SFF field, this book is a wellspring. Even if you’ve been writing SFF for a while, it’s an outstanding reference book. I know SFF writing workshops that make this book required reading.

Writing the Other: A Practical Approach

My last suggestion this week is a book for any writer, but especially those who are white and cis-gendered. Writing the Other: A Practical Approach [ebook only Amazon link] by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. It’s the best resource for understanding how to write characters who differ from you without causing harm to those communities, and how to handle yourself if you do.

I understand from Nisi a revised edition will be released soon, but you can’t go wrong with the current edition. The book shares the experiences of both authors, one black and queer, the other white and cis. It answers if you can write identities other than your own, and spoiler: yes you can. There are ways to do it well, and ways to do it poorly. Cynthia and Nisi delve into all of it.

I recommend this for SFF writers because too often we think we’re just making up worlds and don’t need to worry about diverse identities. But nothing could be more mistaken. The worlds we create project our own real-world views intentionally or not. We should be intentional and aware of the roots of the identities we create even in secondary worlds.

Photo by Darwin Vegher on Unsplash
My list

I can’t say these are the best books for you, I just know they helped and are still helping me. Find books you can refer to again and again, and those that inspire you. Find one that covers the craft and process of writing from beginning to end. Then find books that cover something you’re weak at. If Dialogue or Description are your weak points, find books specifically on those topics.

I’ve curated a recommended list of books. I own them all so feel free to ask me questions about any of them. I’ll discuss more books and add them to the list as the series continues. Comment below to share your favorite craft books.

In the next installment, I’ll tackle ideas, where to find them and how to develop them into stories. I’ll ask, how weird is too weird?

Kevin Fellows
Kevin Fellows

I’m a poet and author of fantasy and speculative fiction. My debut novel At the End of the World is available now. You can find my poetry in the Star*Line Summer 2020 issue, and at Free Verse Revolution.


Get a monthly digest of Exploring the Craft: Writing SFF delivered to your inbox.