Skip to main content

Musings - How Do You Come Up With Ideas?


FREE your imagination, give it permission to wander.


Ideas come to me all the time. From small details of the plot, to the characters to the scenery. It's like a really rough dream sequence that has no regard for the time or place of its arrival. I've gotten ideas in the shower, at 3 AM, coming or going places, while running errands, watching a movie, reading a book, drinking, listening to someone talking... the brain never stops creating and imagining. You ask yourself "what if" a lot when you're a writer and you allow yourself to answer, to truly imagine whatever images, people, settings and phrases come to mind. These initial ideas become the building blocks of my stories.

I cannot force ideas and I don't need inspiration to write. What I mean is, I can't sit down and say I'm going to plot out a book...but I can free write in order to build on my original ideas. I also don't need to write at a particular time or feel a certain way to write. Because I plot beforehand I know initially where the scene and books are going, therefore don't need inspiration to write them. I don't allow pre-plotting/outlining to be a crutch to writing. I listen when additional plot points or new ideas come along, this to me is as organic as it gets. I am not good and just writing and not thinking. That's why in yoga I have a hard time bringing my brain to a calm and relaxing point, there is always something or someone shouting at me to do something.

A tool for plotting I've used is courtesy of Alicia Rasley called Outline Your Novel in 30 Minutes. I used this when I outlined my urban fantasy novel. I had an idea of a loose plot before I started so this helped greatly and I used her outlining tips to flesh out the story. Once I have a pretty good outline, I plot all the scenes (or the major scenes) on the Traditional Plot Storytelling Story Board, created by Carolyn E. Copper in 2008. The reason I use this as a tool is because it goes through the stages a story arc contains and becomes my check off list.

Happy plotting!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Advice for Writers

The Best advice I can give to writers can be summed up in five tips and is partly what I've read, heard or learned on my writing journey.    First  – Keep writing and be ready. Write as many novels (and short story, poems, essays, etc.) as you can. Learn how to write a synopsis and query if you plan on submitting to agents and publishers. Learn the mechanics of writing and structuring a story. Take classes, enter contests, find mentors, work with beta readers, critique partners and editors - all with the goal of improving your skills and making your novels better. Second  – The road to getting published is not for the faint of heart. If you can’t learn to live with constant rejection then you might not want to publish your work.   Writers must grow thick skin. We are going to be judged by our work constantly and must remember why we write in order to overcome haters, trolls or simply people who don't like our work/style. Not everyone is go...
2 comments
Read more

What's Up with Diversity in Color in the Publishing Industry

In the last few years, there has been a big push for diversity that seems to have gone hand in hand with the Black Lives Matter movement. According to a  2019 survey , 76 percent of the people who acquire and edit books are white.  When agents who are the gatekeepers within the publishing industry — in most cases the Big 4 publishers and their subsidiaries won’t consider novels without agents attached — are white, finding diverse voices they connect can be a problem.   Human nature dictates we are all ruled by our biases, morals, and experiences. How can someone who hasn’t faced similar life circumstances because of their color or “otherness” judge our books and the messages within them? via GIPHY Zora Neale Hurston  wrote an article in 1950  called, “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (over 72 years ago, people!)—let’s pause to take in this fact. This thing that happened for this exceptional black woman author so long ago that is still relevant today. via ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Query Wins for Me

I am getting ready to query again after about a six-month hiatus and looked back through my records of responses and was quite pleased.  In the past, I’ve had many close calls. I’ve had full requests from publishers and agents alike for a few different books I queried. I could have given up with the mounting rejections but the rejections I’ve gotten over the last year and a half have MOSTLY been inspiring. This might not make sense to anyone who hasn’t been through the querying trenches but there is such a thing as a good rejection. A good “no” per se. In posting this I want to say that if you are a writer seeking publication, you need to keep writing, revising and editing…but especially keep submitting. Here are a few of my rejections: “I loved the concept and was riveted by the world you have created, but ultimately I just didn’t fall in love with the voice. It’s not for me, but I wish you the best of luck in your search for representation.” ‘There was so muc...
Post a Comment
Read more