I’ve been to my fair share of writing classes and writing workshops and writing groups, and one thing that comes up regularly is how to come up with ideas. I have to say, for me this isn’t a problem - the problem is how to recognise which story ideas are good enough to use and how to focus on one idea to the exclusion of all others for the duration of the project.
Now that last one is a toughie. There’s something seductive about the white-hot realisation of a new idea - the moment when you recognise it, when it’s better than anything you’ve written before, when this could be: the one!
So I thought I’d turn my attention, briefly, to where the ideas come from. For me it’s often an image. So for example, the short story I’ve just finished was prompted by the image of our cat on his haunches stalking a couple of birds in the garden (Don’t worry - this is a popular past time of our cat but the birds are safe, and I think they know it!).
Race, which was published in Morpheus Tales IX, came from walking down an old cobbled street and everyone seemed to be pushing and shoving each other to get past. While Murden’s Hollow, published in the House of Horror (and you can read it online for free!) came from sitting in the car on the M1 and seeing the road bend around a small, enclosed field. In fact, motorway driving (or passengering, in the case of Murden’s Hollow and SkyDogs which is the story I’m editing at the moment) is an excellent breeding ground for ideas.
So many of the images are mundane, nothing strikingly terrifying about them (at this point I think about Stephen King saying that The Langoliers in “Four Past Midnight” came from the image of a woman holding her hand over a crack in the wall of a plane - now that’s a terrific image to start a story with!) but often the image is the speck of dust around which the pearl of a story is formed.
There are all sorts of tips and techniques on how to generate story ideas if you’re stuck for something to write about. Perhaps the one I most vehemently subscribe to is: write it down! I quite often have stray opening story lines roll into my head (Don’t ask…it’s a strange enough place at the best of times) and so I always try to capture them. Sometimes these lines flourish into whole paragraphs (gasp) sometimes they even make it as the opening of a completed story, but they always start with me making a note. I have these errant opening lines all over the place - I even have a special folder in my writing files just for “opening lines”. Often they’re never more than that, but it does mean when the white-hot fire hits me I’ve got a way to capture it and try and tame it.
Which brings me back to where I came in. For me, the challenge is usually not identifying the idea, it’s holding onto it long enough to make it into a story, when there is the lure of all these other, newer and hotter ideas vying for my attention. Having somewhere to store everything that comes in also allows me the freedom to put it out of the way so it doesn’t distract me from what I’m supposed to be working on.
And as for “Fornits”… well you’re just going to have to work that one out for yourself!
