So You Have An Idea...

Congratulations! You have an idea for a book. Good job! Now, the hard part: developing the idea.

Any piece of work once began as a measly idea. An "I think this would be interesting" moment. Very rarely do writers have a "Eureka!" moment when a fully sketched idea comes to them with perfect detail and wonderful plot twists, with the right amount of drama and tragedy that it would make Shakespeare turn over in his grave. Nah. That doesn't happen.

Eureka!
What does happen is you get one ittsy-bitty, little, microscopic hitch that ruins your life until it is born into something bigger (and lets face it, even then it continues to wreak havoc). Sometimes it comes in the form of a character, sometimes a place, or a time period. Whatever it is, an idea is how any story begins, which means no idea is a bad one.

When I began writing Beauty from Ashes in 2014, all I had to go on were two nameless, faceless characters shrouded in mystery that I found myself being pestered by day-in and out. My idea for Ashes stemmed from two characters I knew nothing about, and I couldn't ignore them. If you have that same inescapable feeling taunting you, don't ignore it! My favorite rule of writing is that rules don't apply, so take whatever idea you have an run with it!

One Stone At a Time
I like to cultivate my idea over a period of time. For instance, I'm in the developing stages of Heart Against the Waves, my third novel. The male lead has been aging for several years, while I've only just begun to etch out his counterpart. With this novel and the others I've written, I'm building it slowly, patiently, but that doesn't mean I'm not working on it daily. Much like with my other two books, I dedicate a certain amount of time to the idea each day but don't allow myself to get too overwhelmed with the details (or lack there of).

Pace yourself. Make a list of things that need to be done. Find a setting (time, place, season), discover your cast of characters (who they are, what their interests are, their backstories, hopes, dreams, motives, goals, fears, education, what kind of childhood they had), work on the plot and make it interesting (ask yourself "How could I possibly make this more gripping?" or "How can I make this character real?"). Knowing these three things alone will begin to pave the way for your story.

Never Give Up
Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will your book fall into place in a day. Each stone - each piece of your story - will be laboriously chipped away at and placed, eventually creating the masterpiece it was destined to be. Working on it, even when you don't feel like it, is essential. For an idea to become something more, it takes work. Hard work, and lots of it. My advice to anyone who has an idea for a book, poem, screenplay, or other literary art is to chisel out a time frame you can have everyday to work on the idea. And then sit down and do it.

Developing an idea is just the beginning, and the beginning of anything is always hard. There's sticky parts and it's clumsy. Some days you'll get a lot accomplished and other days you'll be lucky if you do anything at all. But pull yourself up off the floor, take a walk, drink some tea, and start again tomorrow.

I hope this short introduction to idea development has helped those doe-eyed aspiring writers out there. Three years into my writing career and this is some things I wish I had known at the beginning. Next week I'll be talking about naming characters!

God bless, lovelies!