『Finding the Idea You Have to Write』のカバーアート

Finding the Idea You Have to Write

Finding the Idea You Have to Write

無料で聴く

ポッドキャストの詳細を見る
For me, the most hectic—and refreshing—moment is when one book is finished and turned in. My mind doesn’t like to be idle, so I find things to do. I read. I explore. I bake. And eventually, I reach that moment when my brain says, “The heck with this. Let’s write. The question becomes, what do I write.”This week’s tool: Idea Assessment: Finding the Idea You Have to WriteGetting started is one of the hardest things a writer has to do.Where do you begin when you want to write the next great American novel? My first piece of advice is simple: take your expectations down.That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dream big. Dream as big as you want. But no great novel can come from you if you aren’t committed to writing the novel in the first place.Writing is one of those endeavors where best intentions, wishes, and all the things you would’ve, should’ve, could’ve written don’t count for much. At some point, you have to show up and put words on paper. That’s how you win the game—or, more accurately, how you put yourself in the game.Before there are chapters, however, there is an idea.And an idea doesn’t have to arrive fully formed.Where Story Ideas Come FromFor me, book ideas tend to come in three ways: a person, a circumstance, or a fascination that won’t let me go.Because I write historical fiction, I may happen upon an unusual fact or discover a person in history who immediately piques my interest. Something about that person catches hold of me, and I need to know more.That happened with Queen of Exiles. While researching and writing Sister Mother Warrior, I encountered the story of Marie-Louise Coidavid Christophe, wife of Henri Christophe. Christophe rose as a soldier in the Haitian Revolution to the liberator Dessalines’s right hand man and then became the king of Haiti, which made Marie-Louise its queen. But what fascinated me was how this simple hotelier’s daughter grew to handle herself on the world stage through building a kingdom in Haiti, then in exile arriving to Europe.I wanted to know her.Who was this woman? What happened to her? What did she experience? How did someone live through such extraordinary transformations?That curiosity became a story.Sometimes, though, it isn’t a person. It’s a circumstance.My Lady Worthing Mysteries grew partly from my fascination with the complicated political and social world surrounding abolition, race, class, and freedom in Regency England. But another piece came from something much more personal: watching Murder, She Wrote with my mother. Those seemingly unrelated things could live together in my imagination—an amateur sleuth stumbling across murders and a historical world filled with political intrigue—catnip.Thus a circumstance became a playground for story.And sometimes an idea begins with nothing more complicated than something you can’t stop thinking about.A question. An image. An experience. Something strange you read. Something that happened to you. Something you wish had happened. Something that makes you angry, delighted, curious, or confused.Pay attention to the thoughts that keep coming back.They may be trying to tell you something.The StoryMetric™ Idea Assessment: Start With the BubbleThis is why I created the StoryMetric™ Idea Assessment process. That’s a lot of fancy words for the way. Vanessa’s brain works and how she teaches story craft.As an engineer, I love spreadsheets and forms. But I love love, magical forms that help build to something. So I built a bubble form where I throw ideas into them, play with those ideas, question them, and gradually refine them until I find the story I know I have to tell.At the beginning, I don’t want perfection. I want possibility.The Idea Bubble is deliberately simple. Give yourself ten minutes and fill the bubbles. One way to get moving is to use a basic story pattern:Subject + Verb + Object + ConflictA girl wants to become an astronaut, but she’s afraid of heights.Is that your novel? Maybe. Maybe not.That’s not the point.The point is that you’ve made something where nothing existed before.Fill another bubble. And another.Don’t edit yourself, not yet. Don’t decide whether an idea is literary enough, commercial enough, original enough, or important enough. Generate first. Assessment comes later.Then take the ideas that create a spark and begin asking questions.What is the situation or circumstance?What fascinates me about it?What question keeps returning?What connection do I have to this idea—something I’ve lived, witnessed, inherited, studied, or wondered about?Now we’re moving from having an idea to discovering whether there might be a story inside it.Give Yourself Permission to Want What You WantThe next question is one writers sometimes don’t want to answer:Why do I want to write this?Maybe you’ve never heard of this subject before and you’re fascinated.Maybe you want to explore something you don’t understand.Maybe there’s ...
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
まだレビューはありません