Process #1 - Questions and Answers
“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house . . . The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is . . . but as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows.”
-George R.R. Martin
When I first started writing, I spent a baffling amount of time trying to figure out other author’s writing processes. I’m not really sure why, other than the fact I remember not wanting to become a writer the wrong way. I wanted to know where they got their ideas from, where their characters came from, and how they took those elements and turned them into full-fledged stories. I wanted to know what they did to get in the mood to write. I wanted to know how they outlined their novels. I wanted to know when they knew that it was time to stop outlining and when it was time to start writing. I also wanted to know if there were any authors out there who didn’t outline, because when I first started out I hated the idea of outlining. But this post isn’t about outlining, it’s about process (next week’s post will be about outlining).
Process was a black box that as a newbie writer like me made me worried I’d never figure out how to do it right. But the honest truth is, there is no right way of doing it. In fact, everything I’ve ever written has had a slightly different process. So for the next few posts, I want to illustrate some of the ways I build out a story. Today’s will focus a bit on my process for coming up with ideas and characters and how I start to turn them into full stories. Next week’s will be about outlining, and the week after will be something else in this series that I haven’t figured out because guess what? No matter how much planning you do, you gotta just let things happen sometimes.
So how do I come up with ideas and then how do I turn those ideas into stories?
Magic.
Just kidding, though sometimes thinking about how the process of taking tiny little ideas I’ve had and turning them into full stories honestly feels like magic in retrospect. But as I’ve mentioned before, magic can never happen if you never sit down to write. For me, the most important thing when having a new idea is getting it down on paper.
Literally. For me, writing an idea down digitally doesn’t seem to cement it into my mind as easily as writing it down physically on paper. For my current project, a novel called The Brother Paradox, the idea started out simply. The fact that I generally have a really hard time with time travel movies. Other than Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and I’m sure a few other exceptions if you were to fight me on this, but I can’t think of any off-hand, I’m generally not a fan of time travel as a story element. So this story idea literally started as, what if I write a time travel novel where time travel is the problem, not the solution? This entire novel was birthed from that simple idea. Since I haven’t finished the novel yet (I’m trying!), I don’t want to give any spoilers, so let’s talk about how Mariana’s story grew instead.
No matter what story I’m writing, generally I just start writing down these ideas and seeing how they evolve. The mind has a fascinating ability to make connections once we begin exploring those ideas. With my Mariana books, the very first idea I had for them was this idea of a little kid named Hector who had a ghost as a friend that he thought was his imaginary friend, not an actual ghost that was haunting him. This ghost was a nonbinary person named Morgan.
Once I started writing down more ideas on what could be fun about this character, Hector became Mariana, and because I didn’t want my first nonbinary character to be a ghost, I started thinking of other ideas (those who have read book two may recognize that Morgan still ended up in Mariana’s story, just not as a ghost). I thought it’d be funny if that ghost was a historical figure. But a tall tale type historical figure, someone who has become so mythologized by American history that they’ve become more of this legendary archetype of a historical figure, not so much that figure themselves. But then I had to ask myself the question, how did Mariana come to be haunted by Benjamin Franklin? This birthed the idea of the artifacts. Well, why would Mariana have one of these artifacts? That birthed the idea of a magical museum. As I went, I realized this could be a good point to tell the story of two characters I’d come up with years ago, but had not found a way of telling it yet - Mr. Steel and Miss Murphy. What if Mr. Steel was the curator of that magical museum? Etc. Etc.
You can see that generally, my ideas start out as a simple concept that I think would be fun to explore. But as I start to write those ideas down, you have to ask yourself questions. The methodology for answering those questions is just having fun with it. As you begin to answer those questions, the story naturally starts to take shape.
Huh, it’s almost like every story is just asking a question and then answering it. Hmmm (more on that later). But just know that as I start asking myself these questions by writing them down, answers do sort of begin to flow naturally through trial and error. That isn’t to say those answers never change further down the line, but they are certainly the foundation of the stories being built.
But then how do you take those ideas and beats and start turning them into an actual story? How do you maintain the ideas and themes you’re trying to explore while building this all out? How do you not get lost in the vastness of a story while you’re building it all out?
Tune in next week as I walk you through my process of taking these questions and answers and start turning them into some semblance of story.
-Jacob