It’s probably the most-asked question I get, and I always reply, “From my twisted imagination.” And kids laugh, because most of them can relate to having twisted imaginations; it’s as adults that we too often lose touch with this creative capacity.
But in truth, ideas are not as important as readers think. It’s what you do with ideas! Ideas for novels rain on me all day long. I only need to choose one every few months to take and run with. But again, a droplet of an idea is just that. It’s how you grow it, nurture it, develop it into a full-blown readable, hopefully gripping, story that counts. My best tip for developing an idea is to immerse yourself in one or all of the following books and CD: Weekend Novelist, Writing the Breakout Novel, or The Hero’s Two Journeys. Then develop your own template for drawing an outline out of your original idea.
For me, the hard work is outlining, the fun part is writing. And I figure I have to “earn” the fun part by doing the hard work. Yes, some writers write without an outline, but my experience is that doing so means the writing takes twice as long as doesn’t turn out as well. And yes, writing can be hard work too, but so often when one is stuck during the writing process, it’s because the outline wasn’t thorough enough, or because it needs some tweaking.
In future blogs, I’ll reveal how I took and ran with some of the ideas that fired my twisted imagination.
