From Concept to Page One (Patreon)

“Where do you get your ideas?” is a cliché question most creatives hear all too often.

For me, coming up with cool story concepts is usually the easy part. It’s different for everyone. But a quick look at my writing white board shows thirteen concepts to develop, most of which haven’t gone beyond the first steps of “a core idea and some feelings and maybe touchstones.” I get ideas from reading or watching something and thinking to myself “I would have done it this way. Because if you X and Y when Z happens, instead you can have this and then focus on that part…”

Developing an idea from that first spark of interest, that seed of a concept, all the way to the point where you’re breaking ground on the first page? 

That’s much harder. 

But since I’ve started three different projects this year (and am sticking with one of them), I thought that this topic request (from Patron John A.) would be a good one to unpack.

Here are some of the tools and approaches that I find most useful when trying to develop an idea to the point where I’m ready to write. I do a fair bit of outlining, so I’ll try to set that part aside at least a little bit so that this can maybe be useful for people that are more organic/discovery/pantser-style writers as well.

Ask Questions

This approach has been incredibly useful for me, both in writing work and in RPGs – it’s in part inspired by the GMing advice in the Powered by the Apocalypse games (hacks of APOCALYPSE WORLD by Vincent Baker & Meguey Baker).

What “Ask Questions” means is to follow your curiosity and use it to bring clarity and concrete-ness to areas of the concept that are fuzzy or undefined. 

Some examples:

“How does that work?” – w/r/t the magic, the special technology, the idea for an interesting sociological system. This forces you to unpack and explain something to yourself a bit more. Doing so should point in several directions – places where the details of magic/tech/sociology connect with other parts of the world/setting.

“How does this <idea/magic/technology> interact with other aspects of society?” – This one flows out of the question above. How does this speculative element impact technological development? How does it interact with religion? If the Big Idea or speculative element isn’t new to your world, it’s probably already impacted the rest of society. How has the magic system shaped history in your world? How has this technology impacted kinship traditions? Gender relations? The economic systems?

“Who has the power here?” – Who controls the magic/tech? Who makes the rules for how systems operate works, who has the power to declare and wage war? Who can use the magic and are they different from who socially/politically controls the use of that power? People with a lot of societal power tend to have a lot invested in the status quo, and can make good protagonists/antagonists. I’ll elaborate more on this below.

“Who stands to lose or gain the most here?” – This question draws upon another RPG that made a big impact on me as a storyteller – SHOCK: SOCIAL SCIENCE FICTION by Joshua A.C. Newman. SHOCK has a whole system for casting in a way to ensure that you’ll get good POV characters to investigate the intersection of a social issue and a new technology/magic. By picking people who stand to lose power/influence/friends/family/etc. from one or more of the central tensions of a setting.

“What central tensions are operating here?” Often in speculative fiction, the central tension results from some aspect of worldbuilding and plays out between people and/or factions that relate to that element of worldbuilding in different ways. 

An example: “In a world where only the well-hydrated can use magic, but water is scarce, a drought has split a country down the middle between the church which demands equitable water rationing and the military which has seized most of the remaining water sources.” In this world, the central tension is “control of water and therefore magic”, and the factions put into conflict by this tension are the church and the military. Here, we’ve dug deeper with the concept “hydration controls access to magic” in showing how factions would fight over water, we’ve made it scarce to exacerbate tensions, and we have several likely sources for casting protagonists/antagonists: people in the church, the military, and people shut out from those two, either outside society or stuck in the middle.

Make a Wish List

For this one, I give a hat tip to author Annie Bellet. She’s the first person I remember talking about this specific idea. 

Brainstorm all of the things you like about a sub-genre or premise. The tropes and archetypes that apply in the storytelling space you’re looking to investigate with the project. This gives you a wish list to shop from in constructing your project. It can suggest plot beats, settings, ideas for supporting/side characters, and more.

When I was working on a superhero story earlier this year (currently shelved), I thought about some of the parts of superhero storytelling I love the most:

Fighting for what you believe in
Legacy heroes
Big set-piece action scenes
Hero team-ups
Overwhelming odds
Supers teamups among friends
Hero/Secret Identity Conflict
Hero vs. Disaster

A related trick to try is being explicit about your influences. List your touchstones for the project – other works in that sub-genre that are inspiring you – to reflect on what you’re building on and/or reacting to as a creator.

With touchstones and a trope/archetype wish list in hand, you have some building blocks you can start fitting together to build some conceptual and/or plot structure.

“So if the hero draws on the people around him, the best big set-piece would be in some event with a huge crowd. And what if that event is something they’re attending in their secret identity so that they both have people there to connect and being absent (as a hero) also creates social fallout even if they triumph as a hero”.

Do that a few times and you’ve got some bigger building blocks to start putting together.

Figure Out What You Want to Say

One of the ways I can make progress when developing a project is to figure out at least a rough draft of what I want to capital-S-Say with the project. Alternatively, I think about the thematic questions I want to investigate. You don’t have to make every bit of a story defy a status quo or posit some new social ideal, but choices should be made consciously. And theme can be a great focusing lens through which to look at other aspects of your story/setting/characters.

With the currently-shelved superhero story, I was directly pushing against an impulse I see in superhero stories, where heroes address symptoms of social problems but not the root causes. I was specifically reacting to the Batman story WHITE KNIGHT, where the Joker “goes sane” and becomes a political candidate, utilizing Bernie Sanders/Occupy-ish talking points. But his critique of Batman leads to the proposal “We’ll give the Batman’s tools to the police and that will be so much better!” rather than “The police state has been weaponized against the poor and is fueled by corruption and corporatism”. For me, that fell really flat and seemed like it missed a real opportunity to reflect on core assumptions built into the Batman mythos that are seldom considered with any seriousness. From what I can tell, the creators weren’t interested in making the point I wanted from the story, so I had to do it myself.

You don’t have to go into a project with a clear answer that the novel will provide. Often times it’s more useful to refine what questions you want to ask, to define the thematic territory which you’ll use as your playing field for the project. The thematic questions may be as familiar as “What price would you pay to protect those you love?” or “Is it acceptable to do bad things in order to achieve good ends?” or incredibly specific, bringing a graduate-level academic inquiry to bear in a speculative setting ala “How does socialist feminism play out in a science fiction world where the labor of reproduction falls entirely on android surrogates?” Bam, you’ve got a project you can pitch as WESTWORLD meets THE HANDMAID’S TALE.

Outline <=> Concept Work

As an outline-oriented author, I tend to move back and forth between concept development and my outline. I identify the shape of character arcs based on how I see them interacting with the world and other characters, then poke at the outline and see what questions about the world I need to answer for myself before I can be confident of how those actions will play out and create new conflicts for the rest of the project. I tend to spitball concept and character and plot bits until I can’t help but dive into page one and get to know the characters better. 

I think this comes from being an RPG player, since it’s hard for me to get to know a character beyond a certain point without writing them in a scene. As a result, I tend to dive in and start writing earlier than some others might, but I also bounce between drafting and re-outlining rather than following the entire outline from the first beat to the end of the novel.

If you’re more of a discovery/organic/pantser type of writer, then maybe you spend more time developing characters and settings so that you have an even clearer sense of how the world interacts. That way, when you dive in and start bouncing characters off of one another and the world, you have confidence in how you want elements to interact so you can stay immersed in the world and the flow of the story.

Ready, Set, Plan

So there are some tips and tricks on how to develop the seed of an idea into something ready to start writing. It’s taken a lot of trial and error over the years to train and apply these skills and techniques, and I’ve done things a bit differently with each project, even the three this year. Try to not get too discouraged if the process is messy, and if the above fails you, I highly recommend just diving in to prose and see if you can find your way through the writing itself.

Good luck!

Postscript: What tools have you used to unpack and develop your ideas? Do you use map-makers, character sheets, or anything else?