Writing: How Do You Turn an Idea Into a Novel?

(In Which Sarah’s Campfire Imagery Gets Out of Control)

For most writers, random ideas are a dime a dozen. I read the news, I watch a TV show I almost like, I daydream a kick-butt action scene where I use hockey and my PhD research to fight off Moriarty, and boom: I have a scene I want to write, a striking image, or a plot conceit I think would be so cool.

None of these things is the basis for a novel.

A novel needs more than a spark. A novel needs a well constructed “log cabin” or “teepee” (the plot arc). It needs good, dry tinder (strong action). And it needs clean-burning flames carefully applied in the right spots (strong characters).*

My first ideas are always puny things. “A world where people legally have to believe in G-d because beliefs can come true.” Bleh. That’s barely a conceit, let alone a story.

I didn’t mean to continue this fire/firewood analogy, but let’s run with it: first ideas are like single sticks. They are easy to break and can’t support much, and forget about roasting some marshmallows unless someone else already has a good fire going.

However, if you start collecting more and more sticks, eventually you’re going to end up with a solid bundle. That sucker’s not gonna break, and, as you collect sticks of different shapes and sizes, you’ll find you have all you need: tinder to get the fire going, fuel to stoke the flames, and one or two heavy-duty logs to hold the whole thing together and keep the coals smouldering.

Each of the manuscripts I’ve worked on needed a whole cord of ideas to get started. Sometimes, I fall in love with a bunch of characters who need a plot so their story isn’t just them whining and having big, emotional confrontations all the time.

Other times, I love the nucleus of a plot that doesn’t have any actual beats fleshed out. “A super-strong alien who can fly disguises himself as a mild-mannered reporter and saves people from bad guys” is a great scene-brainstorm starter, but it’s too vague to give you scenes like “Lois Lane tells Clark Kent how much she likes Superman” or “Superman spins the Earth the opposite direction to turn back time and save the woman he loves.”

Still other times, I really like the idea of a particular scene or moment or image or feeling, but I have no clue who might act it out or what purpose it might serve in a larger plot. Why would that situation ever arise? Why would any character be doing that activity at that place at that moment? Who knows?

So I test. If one of my ideas — scene, character, plot — is too darn hot for me to let go, I see what happens when I touch it to the other ideas I have kicking around.

Sometimes, it fizzles out into smoke. I might love those characters and this plot, but they just don’t work together.

Sometimes, though, I get the hint of a blaze. If I’ve got a critical mass of ideas piled up, that might be enough to drive me forward through a first draft. If it’s not quite there yet, I know it’s time to enjoy the process of scrounging for more material — combing through my subconscious for pieces of inspiration just the right size to connect or support.

One of the nice things about writing is material that didn’t quite burn the first time — stories that never sold, novel drafts I wound up abandoning halfway through, attempted beginnings — is still around. I can dig through it on my hard drive and in the notebooks I’ve saved since I was in grade school, sift through the half-consumed ashes until I find something worth rescuing.

When I wasn’t sure what to do with the puny “belief” idea above, I mixed it up with a bunch of ideas I already had until suddenly I found what it needed: there, buried in the cinders of a short story I once tried to write, a subversive pastiche of Holmes and Watson — oh, and that one, too, where I thought of gender-reversing the Holmes-Watson trope but never quite got around to it.

Once those three ideas had a chance to interact with each other, well, let’s just say that in this extended metaphor, Smokey the Bear had reason to look nervous. The plot and characters consumed my brain, on-task and daydreaming, and they’re still going strong.  (Maybe a little too strong. Sorry, switched metaphors.)

Seeing how ideas change when they come together is one of my favourite parts of writing. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as rooting through my memories and old notes to find the missing piece of a story, and there’s nothing that, well, fires up my imagination as hot as story ideas that I thought were completely different merging and melding and interacting to make something exciting and new.

* If you’re going to sell this novel, it also needs good environmental conditions like no wind and no rain (the right market), and if you’re going to come out the other side sane, it needs a good space around it clear of anything else flammable to keep the flames hot but under control (a safe distance from your point-of-no-return psychological triggers), but let’s not beat this analogy into the ground, OK? Also, only YOU can prevent forest fires. Don’t play with matches. Write instead.