Sorry for the unplanned outage. As it turns out, there's been a bit of break in progress on my own novel, but not because I'm suffering from writer's block. Actually, it's good news. I've sold my second nonfiction book, this one on the gulf between the many predictions of impending worldwide doom, and the actual threats we face. So ... cool. I'll have the details as soon as the i's are dotted and the t's crossed.
Because I've needed to scramble a bit to rewrite those essays (many of which originally appeared here) and write new opening chapters for what was once a book about 2012 that will now appear in 2013, I've had to shelf the exploits of DARPA and their secret 1992 mission into deep space. However, I still intend to finish by mid-summer. So if you're trying to meet the same schedule, take advantage of this opportunity to get a lead on me.
All right, back to work. In previous entries, we looked at basic story structure, the importance of defining your characters, how viewpoint shapes the experience and how setting supports the story.
Now I suppose it's time to talk about the thing that most people start with.
Whenever someone walks up to me with the phrase "I have an idea for a novel," I can be pretty sure that what they have isn't a clear conception of a group of characters, it's not a firm grasp of the novel's voice or a cinematic feel for the setting. What they have is what's loosely referred to as a plot. You know, aliens invade Earth and our weapons are useless, Russian submarine commander decides to defect and bring his boat with him, or small town in Maine becomes infested by vampires. A plot.
The funny thing is that people always seem to be in pursuit of these things. If you sit on a panel at a writing convention, the second most common question (after "how do I get an agent") is always "where do you get your ideas?" It's such a common question that most writers keep a standard response handy, many of them quite funny. But the truth is actually more surprising than a post office box in Jersey, the cabinet below a certain hot dog stand, or a trench coat wearing guy who shows up along the riverfront on rainy Tuesdays. The answer is that ... ideas are easy. The easiest part of a novel, almost without exception.
Partly that's because most ideas are just variants on existing ideas or puzzles reassembled from bits and pieces of other works. That doesn't make them bad. Heck, even old Bill Shakespeare didn't invent the idea of star-crossed lovers, he just did it better. So can you.
The hard part of writing a novel is the most plebeian, least romantic part. It's called writing. It's the thing that happens day after day, rain or shine, until you've ruined 400 or so otherwise perfectly serviceable pieces of paper. The idea? Bah, not an issue.
In fact, if you've done those other things we talked about—determined whose story this is, figured out how you want to tell it, and set the story firmly in a place—the idea will almost take care of itself.
In case you're having a problem, try this little exercise. Go to the nearest book shelf, drag down two volumes at random, and turn them both to the same page. Let's say ... page 132. It doesn't matter if what you've plucked is tattered Harlequin paperbacks or volumes from the 1948 Funk & Wagnall's, this will work either way. Just scan those two pages for something that catches your eye. Maybe one features a mail carrier. Maybe the other is about the White House. Hey, presto ... just who does deliver the president's mail? Do the Land's End catalogs end up in the Oval Office? Is Fly Fisherman still sending copies on a subscription penciled in during the Eisenhower administration? There's no shortage of ideas in this mash up.
The first time I tried this little exercise, I ended up looking at one page of a book about the Little Ice Age and another page about Christopher Columbus. Put them together, and I wrote a story called In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Three, Columbus Crossed the Frozen Sea. I wrote it that night, sold it the next day.
Ideas, kids, are a dime a dozen. It's what you do with them that counts.
Here. Shove away your current manuscript for a minute. Let's do a little exercise. I'm going to put down three basic ideas, the sort of "high concept" that most people think is so valuable that they worry someone might come along to steal it. You take a comment and write a bit of the story. Your version of the story. Dollars to donuts that what everyone sees from these oh-so-valuable plots is something very different, something shaped by their own concepts of setting, voice, and characters. And now, fresh from randomly selected pages on my bookshelf ...
1. A former middleweight boxing contender takes a position as a small town police officer and encounters a kind of obstacle he never knew in the ring.
2. An award-winning investigative journalist loses his/her job and accepts what appears to be big step down to a job writing technical manuals.
3. Pennies found flatted along the rails of a long out of business railroad, turn out to have an unexpected value.
There you go. Those are pretty serviceable starts. Will the boxer be able to use his wits as well as his fists to solve a mystery, or will he turn from home town hero to local tyrant? Up to you. Will the journalist discover that her investigative skills are put to good use uncovering the truth behind a seemingly innocuous project, or will she find the new job has its own rewards? Will those pennies encourage an old man to spill his memories of days traveling by boxcar, or will they serve as tokens on a line that still runs behind the hills and under the light of the moon? That's up to you.
Give one a try, and let's find out.