Everyone has a library of story ideas
Hello, friends!
Today I'm thinking about where story ideas originate. Right now I'm working on two projects. One, The Dark Age, weaves together a few different stories, each of which connects to a larger tale. With the other book, a novel I'm adapting from a story told in another medium, I'm bringing some of my own story ideas to the work, and weaving them into the primary tale as a way to expand the story's world for the novel format.
Recently I happened across this decade-old Gizmodo piece by short story expert Kelly Link. Link talks about where story ideas come from, and shares a few methods.
The first starts with a piece of advice:
This is something that the writer Greg Frost suggested — he got it from a talk that the poet/novelist/short story writer Stephen Dobyns gave, and said that Stephen Dobyns himself came up with it after he once asked Raymond Carver about how Carver approached writing short stories. Carver said, "I write the first sentence, and then I write the next sentence and then the next."
Whew. Okay: From Carver to Dobyns to Frost to Link. That's a heck of an evidence chain. But I don't suppose the origin of this advice is quite as important as what Stephen Dobyns did with it:
Apparently this answer at first annoyed Dobyns, whose usual method involved much more planning etc; later, when Dobyns was marooned for two days in a hotel room, feverish, and unable to catch a flight home, he sat down and tried Carver's method. So here's the exercise: without too much preparation, and without spending too much time — say, more than an hour — write down 50 first sentences. Later on, sit down with those 50 sentences, pick half of them, and write 25 first paragraphs. Out of those first paragraphs, Dobyns eventually got half a dozen short stories.
I like this idea, and I might try it myself the next time I want to generate some story ideas.
Meanwhile, when Link herself contemplates a story, before she begins writing, she often discovers she has more than one interesting idea.
I will often find that another story begins to take form as well, and that both stories will begin to get bigger, lumpier, and more interesting — a bit like rolling two Katamari balls at once, if you've ever played Katamari Damacy. Sometimes these story ideas stay separate, and then I'll have a project ready to pick up as soon as I've finished the first story.
But sometimes, as she points out:
...the various story strands will combine into one bigger story ball, and I've learned that this almost always turns out to be interesting and useful as well.
This I've done before, and I almost always love the results. I keep a notebook filled with ideas, see. They're far, far, far from substantial; sometimes an interesting line of dialogue that I want to think about more someday, sometimes a setting or a premise for a story, sometimes a quick sketch of a character who I think has stories to tell. Often when I'm preparing a project, I'll search this idea notebook, with two questions in mind:
- Can I steal this idea and incorporate it into my main story?
- Can I develop a second story from this idea, then weave it together with the primary story?
I always enjoy the outcome, which takes an ordinary idea and levels it up in some way.
Neil Gaiman once said this:
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you.
... There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better — there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.
I love this bit of advice. It's a reminder that you could ask fifty different writers to write a story from the same seed, and you'd wind up with fifty unique stories. Every writer brings their own baggage, their own personal experiences and joys and preferences, to the page. It's those variations that make a story so wonderful to read.
This, too, is where Link lives. She often begins a story by making a list:
...of things that I most liked in other people's fiction — these could be thematic, character driven, very general or very specific. I found that when I started this list, it began to incorporate ideas and items which I was inventing as I went along.
Here are a few of the items from the list Link made:
theme parks subterranean lakes dog walkers old mysteries — bad things that have happened in the past people who know they are doing stupid things, but keep on doing them people who are blamed for doing things they didn't do ghost stories governesses & parole officers — people with power who can make you miserable, or make you do pointless tasks in order to demonstrate their power mocking celebrities fraught family dynamics attics or basements full of things girls who kick ass, not necessarily for a good reason
A list like this will be different for everyone, of course. What would be on my list? What excites me about other people's stories?
Hmm. A few:
Epistolary narratives (stories told through letters and artifacts) Loneliness and solitude Challenging parent-child relationships Communication across time or long distances Family mysteries (someone who wasn't what they seemed to be) A sense of wonder Minutiae (stories that often wander into the finer details of a character's life) Workplace fiction Mid-twentieth-century experimental flight/space travel Small foreground stories set against the background of large events Small stories with small stakes Threaded stories, with parallel narratives that play off one another
I put that list together just by looking at the books sitting in front of me, on my desk, right now. Everything from The Martian Chronicles to Never Let Me Go to A Tale for the Time Being. But honestly, the reason those books are on my desk is that they're already references for the novel I'm currently writing. The Dark Age touches every single item in that list in some way.
Nick Cave writes a newsletter called The Red Hand Files, in which he answers questions that people send his way. A couple of weeks ago, this was the question:
How or when or do you shut the voices of all your influences (your heroes, your parents, your Jesus, your music) to listen to yourself, to become you or to believe that what you create is your own? —JOHN, BROOKLYN, USA
It's a pretty good question. Every last one of us is inspired by our influences; writers are often told to read books to "fill up the tank," so they've got fuel for their own storytelling efforts. How do you create something original if you're just a bundle of influences?
Cave wrote back gently, as he often does:
Nothing you create is ultimately your own, yet all of it is you. Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence, and is not intrinsic to you, rather it is a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.
And:
In my view, John, worry less about what you make — that will mostly look after itself, and is to some extent beyond your control, and perhaps even none of your business — and devote yourself to nourishing this animating spirit. ... Apply yourself fully to the task, let go of the outcome, and your true voice will appear. You’ll see. It can be no other way.
Such a kind and encouraging response, isn't it? And it echoes Gaiman's earlier observation: That we all bring ourselves to the idea, and change the idea into something only we could have made.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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