read your first post about where ideas come from â how would you describe your process for taking an idea and turning it into a story? for example, your idea that you reference (about watching a child and looking away at the wrong moment) is definitely a compelling one, but it's not a story with a beginning, middle, and end. What's the next step after "idea"?
the way someone moves from idea to story is going to be unique to them, and the process will probably change over the course of that writerâs life as they practice their craft. i try to be deliberate in how i move from idea to story, but i mostly fail, and understanding why -- and how to fail less -- has only come with time.
the idea i posted about did eventually become a short story, which was published in a small sff magazine called lackingtonâs. itâs been several years since i worked on it, but i think my process at the time was to ask a lot of questions of the idea that lead me to building out the story and world, like:
what would happen to a woman who let a child drown?
who is the child, and what if the child were important? what if she were the hope of her family after a time of loss and tragedy?
who is the woman, and what if the woman were not important? what if she refused to accommodate her familyâs desires in a way that made their post-tragedy situation a little more desperate than it needed to be and they resented her for it?
the answers came from what i was already thinking about at the time: fantasy stories with systems of government that didnât include a monarchy, understanding of crime and punishment in a culture without a codified criminal justice system, cultural milieus that viewed children primarily as a pool of physical/intellectual/political labor. that gave me little bits of detail and tension i could string together to create a story with something like a beginning, middle, and end.
along with questions of story content, i also needed to consider my basic storytelling tools, like: who my point of view character would be (generally, the person with the most to lose), how many point of view characters i needed to tell the story (in this case, just one), what point of view and verb tense i was writing in (third person past, i.e. âBiyya ran down the pier...â) and why i was using them (comfort, mostly), and any structural flourishes i wanted to employ (in this case, something of a frame story).
once i had content and structure locked down, i had my story frame and could start building my story... house, and then it was mostly a matter of typing until it was done.
but that sounds a lot more structured and galaxy-brained than the process felt. i wasnât then (and still am not) a great or even good short story writer, so even in asking and answering those questions, i was fumbling around in the dark and working mostly on instinct. and that instinct can take you pretty cool places. iâve published several short stories that i wrote with my gut, and i even like a couple of them. however, when i was writing purely on instinct, i often felt like the story was out of my hands. my subconscious or whatever was steering the ship. and that made it hard to craft and execute on whatever effect i wanted to create in the reader (horror, wonder, empathy, etc.), and harder still to diagnose and fix story elements that werenât working.
moving from an instinctive writing mode to a deliberate one hasnât been a sudden switch. i didnât wake up one day and think, oh shit, i should make carefully considered choices about how i construct my stories. it was more like... learning to see the moments when i was making a choice without thinking about it and then consciously choosing to follow or reconsider that instinct. learning to recognize those moments came from practice, reading stories with an eye toward âhowâd they do that?â, and talking to other writers.
frankly, moving from idea to story is something i still struggle with. whatâs been most valuable for me in this process has been patience -- both with myself and with my ideas. understanding and accepting that i couldnât force myself to get better faster than my brain was able to learn meant that i didnât have to stress so much about the rate at which i improved in my craft. mastery would come at its own pace, and so long as i continued to practice, continued to read, continued to learn, i could let go of the outcome and find joy in the work.
