Story is something I struggle with as a writer. By nature I’m a poet rather than a story writer. I enjoy painting with words more than I like telling stories. And I have a hard time turning my creative ideas into stories. For poetry this isn’t necessary — a poem captures a moment, a thought, a feeling. A poem doesn’t have to be a whole story.
In practice, I find that for anything longer than a poem you can’t just have an idea. You really need a story and a character if you are to have a hope of making it all the way through to the end.
Your idea is just an idea, and isn’t a story (at least not yet)
I don’t know about you, but my ideas almost always start off as just little fragments of thought. Maybe I’ll stumble upon a great opening line, an intangible sort of feeling-thing, or an image that fascinates — but I never have a whole story plop down into my brain as if sent from the universe (or at least very, very rarely).
So it’s important that, as a writer, I learn how to fan the flames of these creative embers and turn your ideas into stories.
And, as far as I can see, there are really only two ways to do this: you can write like a “plotter” or a “pantser”. By which I mean you can sit down and think your idea through until you find the story in it, or you can just start writing by the seat of your pants — putting that little ember down on paper and hoping that it catches fire.
I’ve tried both, and they both work — but I think there are important advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
Pantsing: It works better with ideas for beginnings
If you’re interested in just starting and seeing where you’ll end up, it helps to know where to start. What I mean is the seat-of-your-pants approach works best with ideas that are already interesting opening lines.
If you’ve got a good place to start then diving in may be a perfectly awesome thing to do. Yes, at some point your momentum will run out (probably within the hour if you’re me), but why not charge ahead while the brilliance of the idea is still gathered close around you? Write down as much as you can, as soon as you can. See where the pen takes you. If you don’t like where you end up, you can always go back and re-work things later.
Which is all well and good, but probably only 10% of my ideas come to me as fascinating opening lines.
So what do you do when you don’t have a clear notion of how your story starts?
Plotting: For when you really haven’t the foggiest
If you don’t know where to start then I don’t really recommend pantsing it. You could, but in my experience where you’ll end up is with a quagmire of vague descriptions and unresolved details that will require massive revision at some future date.
So instead, why not do yourself a favor and set things up for success by giving a bit of thought to turning your idea into a proper story?
Let’s consider an example
Recently I had an idea that came to me as an image: unusually colored eyes under a niqab-like veil. Now clearly that’s not a story. It’s really not even a scene. It’s basically nothing.
I could have taken the pantsing approach and written my vision down as a first line: “The first thing I noticed were her eyes….” or “I watch how his brow creases as he meets my gaze and I turn away — I hate they way they always stare whenever they catch sight of my eyes”.
But you can see the problem already, can’t you? These opening lines are crummy.
For one thing, I’ve not said anything about what makes the character’s eyes weird, for another we’ve got not setting, no scene. Instead we’re floating adrift with no purpose and no reason why the reader should care.
Pantsing isn’t really going to cut it with this one. Maybe I’d get to something resembling a decent story eventually, but not before generating tens of pages of useless floundering that would later need to be re-written — and I don’t have that kind of time to waste in my writing life. I’m guessing you don’t either.
So here’s what to do instead.
Plotting: Using interrogation to turn your idea into a story
Here’s an approximation of my thought process for this eyes-under-a-veil idea I’ve been chewing on the past few days:
- What if it’s not just women who wear the veil, what if it’s everyone?
- What if they’re worn all the time, even in the home?
- If all you ever saw of people were there eyes what would be different about their culture?
- I posit: you’d have 1000 words to describe the color, shape, and texture of eyes & eyebrows
- And maybe: you’d have an elaborate verbal/gestural etiquette to make up for lack of visual cues
- How would you be able to tell people apart? Maybe you wouldn’t? (But it seems like differentiation would be necessary for a functioning society)
- Maybe your veil would be unique, an emphasis on different colors or different fabrics by which people could recognize you
- What if you wore your life story embroidered on your veil?
Now we’ve found something interesting
What if there was a society in which everyone was covered head to toe by a veil, but their life stories were painted upon them for all the world to see? What if you embroidered your own veil as part of a coming-of-age ceremony? What if part of what you embroidered was your name?
It’s an intriguing idea. But you’ll no doubt agree it’s still not a story. For one thing I haven’t invented any characters yet, and you really can’t have a story without at least one character.
With the world is better-defined, we can start to see what kind of stories are a good fit
For example, what if the character was transgendered? First, we’d need to answer how gender plays out in a society in which everyone is always veiled — but assuming a gendered society, what if as a teenager/young adult you made your veil in secret, beginning the task of telling your life story in color and thread? What if you were transgendered and made your veil for the gender you identified with, not the gender you were assigned at birth? What would happen when you revealed your veil at your coming of age ceremony? How terrified would you feel?
That could be an interesting story with a scared and vulnerable and very human character at the center of it. There’s obviously a lot more detail that would need to be fleshed out, but at this point I think you could start writing, but I think at this point we’re getting close. Most of the rest of the details could be made up or figured out as I go along.
As much as I like pantsing it, I think it’s important to start with a story — and not just with an idea.
Now I’d love to hear from you — turning ideas into stories is something I’m still figuring out for myself, so if you’ve got any tips or tricks I’d love it if you’d let me know in the comments!