A Story Is Born

​People often ask me how I get ideas for and develop stories.

Each book is different.

Story ideas can come from an experience, a picture, a song, a person, a news clip, or a conversation. But an idea isn’t a story. An idea might be “A princess discovers she’s the guardian of a Mystic treasure she didn’t know existed.” That idea requires hard work and a lot more substance to turn into an 80k-word novel.

My ideas develop in a variety of ways. Some stories grow like Jack’s beanstalk, from a spark to a plot in a matter of minutes. Others take longer. The idea will stew for a few days or weeks. It swirls, bubbles, and swells until I have enough mental images to string together a barebones plot and add to the concepts in a structured way on paper.

My favorite stories are those that leap to life with little effort. But everything I bother to flesh out eventually breathes on its own. If I’m not excited about it, it’s not worth the sweat and trouble to write it down. I despise writing stories that I don’t feel a passion for, and forced words don’t make for pleasant reading.

The Rose of Caledon lived in my head for seven months before I started writing it. Myrhiadh’s War sprang to life like nothing before or since and 75k words hit the page in 33 days. The Mystic’s Mandate was the most hair-tearing writing experience I’ve ever had, while The Curse of Caledon and Guardians of Caledon were easy and fun.

Now that I’ve almost finished Hindsight, the last book in the Dragon’s Fire Series, I’m looking at what to write next. I have a stand-alone manuscript on agent submissions, and it’s time to figure out a fresh project.

One of my documents contains no less than 26 new story ideas. Choosing which to focus my mental energies on was challenging. I narrowed the list to four, then played with them until one surfaced as the most intriguing.

This concept was born within the manuscript that I’m sending to agents. As I’ve mulled over it, it’s changing shape and coming to life in ways I didn’t expect. It no longer shares many of its original descriptions from the existing story. I’m not even sure what genre it fits into. I don’t know who the characters are yet, but we’re chatting—I call the process “talking to shadows.”

The document is a mess of notes and tentative research. The next step will be to organize those into a coherent plot. If that works, and a story bursts into flame amid the sparks, I’ll begin the first draft. No commitments. But I returned the other three concepts to the “ideas” file for now.

Every writer has piles of unfinished manuscripts, and not every idea turns into a Myrhiadh’s War experience. Not every story is publishable. For now, I’ll let my imagination run wild and see where it leads.