Writing Tips: Ideas and Planning

January 7, 2008 · Posted in Writing

(Originally posted at http://mcory.wordpress.com/ on 11/08/07)

This post is directed at one individual who left a comment on the Like Glass page; seemed a little lengthy for a reply, and I figured it’d make for a good post anyways. I don’t mean to single them out in particular — and you have my apologies for doing so — but they said something I felt I needed to talk about: coming up with ideas.

I’m sure you know what it’s like to take pen in hand and just sit there, waiting for that perfect thought to come up that’ll change the literary world forever. After a while — fifteen minutes, half an hour, half a day if you’re really patient — you give up in frustration and you start thinking stuff like “Damn, I just can’t come up with anything.” Or maybe you don’t even bother getting ready to take the idea down, you just get the urge to write and shut it out because you know you can’t come up with anything.

I cry malarchy on that.

You can come up with ideas. Its really easy, but it’s easier to just talk yourself out of it. Maybe you don’t think you have time to bring the idea to fruition. Maybe you think you’ll just be laughed at by anyone who finds out about it. Maybe you don’t want to write something without knowing exactly where it’ll start and where it’ll end. I don’t know why, but I do know the odds are good that you probably have a ton of ideas that you’ve just gotten so used to knocking out of the water that you don’t even know you’ve come up with something anymore.

You need to look inside and see what exactly it is that stops you from taking your idea and running with it — I can’t help you with that. I can tell you that I personally have lots of fear of rejection. “I can’t do this because someone will say it’s stupid.” “I couldn’t get that story published if I paid them to print it.” Stuff like that. I try and work around it, and just realizing that that’s what stands in my way helps, but it’s tough. You just do the best you can and (pardon my french) fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

I want you to try something. Get a piece of paper, or open up Notepad or Word or some other text editor on your computer. Now, I want you to write a really, really simple sentence. We’re talking first-grader stuff here: The boy ran to the store. The tree fell. The dog barked. Just a simple “noun that did something” sentence, and come up with one of your own — these examples are protected by copyright law now.

Got it? Great. See how easy that was? You just had an idea. This idea — that simple sentence you just wrote out — is the seed for a story. It’s a tiny seed, true, but a seed nonetheless. Now you build on it by asking yourself questions. Why did the boy run to the store? Was he running from something? Was he running to someone? Was the dog barking out of happiness at seeing his owner? Out of fear of something in the back yard?

If you keep asking yourself questions like that, you’ll eventually have a scene, or a story, hell, even a full novel if you ask enough questions.

Of course, coming up with ideas inevitably leads to questions about planning and organizing your ideas. A lot of writers feel the need to have everything planned out, start to finish, before they write the first lines. Then they’ll go through and write everything in the order their plan presents. If that has worked for you in the past, great, by all means keep it up.

Here’s a bit of news for you though: you don’t need to know anything about your story before you write it! Seriously, that’s half the fun of writing: watching it develop in front of your eyes.

When I wrote Like Glass, I had most of it planned out like you’re “supposed to”. I had a series of notes placed in order and it worked decently for me. Then about halfway through the story started to change. For one reason or another, the plan wasn’t quite working anymore, and I got stuck. After freaking out for a bit, I decided “hey, this is the way the story needs to go, and to hell with the plan.” I changed the plan midway and was able to finish the book. Hell, even when I started, I only had a rough idea of the ending, and kept bouncing back and forth between a couple of different options while I was writing the novel. Then when it came time to draw it to a close, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I was glad I didn’t paint myself into a corner with having everything pre-planned.

I wish I could keep writing about this, but the time has come for my cigarette and to run to work.