Where do my ideas come from? That's a question friends, family, and fans have been asking me for years now. How do I come up with so many different plots and characters? How do I create the varied worlds and magical powers that make my stories unique? I've always shrugged and said they just come to me, but it's a little more complicated than that.
Each one of my stories started as a little seed in my head. I might think of one character or a bit of scenery. Sometimes it's a new type of magic. The seed is never anything concrete, just a tiny idea of something that could potentially be interesting. A good example of that is a sword I've been trying to write about. It started out as only a mental image: a plain, leather wrapped hilt with a hole where the missing blade should have been. Most of those seeds never grow. A benchmark I use to tell whether one of my ideas has real potential is honestly whether I still remember it the next day. I have dozens of little ideas a week, but the majority of them are only little daydreams that fade away as swiftly as they appear. For me to remember an idea, it has to be engaging enough to keep my attention. That strange hilt has stayed with me for weeks now. I wanted to know why the blade was missing and what was so important about such a simple hilt. Those thoughts pushed me to figuring out the answers. It turned out the blade wasn't missing at all. It was an energy sword, which meant that in the right hands a blade made from pure magical energy would erupt though the hole. The hilt was no longer a seed. I gave it an interesting function, which led me to thinking about who would be able to use such a sword. I have had potential ideas fizzle out at this point as well. Sometimes there aren't answers to those questions, other times the answers are boring or too mundane to make a good story. A lot of the time a better idea overtakes the one I was previously working on and the old idea is forgotten. Ideas percolate for months and sometimes years as I try to figure out where the next step is. That's a lot of time for something great to form and is equally more than enough time for me to forget about an idea entirely. Actually writing down an idea doesn't start for a while. I need a solid foundation to start from before I can even think about putting words on paper. Usually I come up with a scene from the story, something that would pull me in if I were a reader. A man is holding the sword, the blade translucent white with a slight sparkle to it. He is fighting someone else and is winning thanks to the overwhelming magical energy powering his sword. Which, of course, leads to even more questions. Why is he fighting? Who is he fighting for? He is working undercover to protect the queen from assassins as she travels across the country to meet her fiance. How does the magic work that he can be so powerful and his enemy is not? Hours and years of hard work and practice. Each one of the answers to those questions leads to the story growing even more. Now I have a good starting point: I have a reason for the main character to exist, a plot to make him part of, and an interesting magical setting to have him traverse through. That is enough to start writing. I have created a base to build off of and as I write the rest of the details will continue to solidify. I know I can always go back and edit that first scene later on if I discover something new that changes the way that scene flows. This is the point where I sit down and really start working on a story. So that's where my ideas come from. It's not particularly glamorous to say that each dragon I came up with only reached paper because I found the character engaging enough that I didn't forget about him or her, but that's the bare bones of it. There's also one other aspect to look at: when to actually write a story. It turns out I can't just start writing whenever an idea solidifies. One glance at my current to-do list tells me that if I start working on the sword hilt story right this moment I'll regret it tomorrow. I need to whittle down my list a lot before I start adding new things to it. However, should LT3 or another publisher post an anthology or collection call that the sword hilt story would be perfect for--knights in shining armor, for example--I would then have a reason to begin working on it. I hope this begins to answer the question about how I come up with my ideas. Please keep asking me questions. I look forward to each and every one.
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April 15, 2023 AuthorMell Eight is an author writing with NSP. For more information about Mell and her writing, please visit her website: http://melleightfiction. Tags
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