Writing Lessons 2: The idea
So last week we looked at getting experience to give
your stories context and now it’s time to move onto the creation process.
Unless you are some kind of Abnormal then you can’t write a story just plain
without any planning or thinking about it. It doesn’t really matter how you get
it but you need a core idea and some notion of where the plot is going. It
could be from a dream, a flash of brilliance or carefully calculated to appeal
to the market. All that matters is you have that nugget of something that you
can expand on as you go; I’ll look at that later but right now we are just
going to look at the idea stage. Let’s dig in shall we?
Got to make one thing clear before we go anywhere; nothing is unique because it only exists in context with everything else. Whatever your religious and/or scientific views are of the beginning of the universe we all can agree that something came first right? Well whatever that thing was then it is the ONLY thing in all of history that is truly 100% unique and without anything similar to anything that came before purely because nothing did come before. Let’s take a look at my story Hear♀ and s♂ul; the cranes are based on Japanese mythology (I’ll get more in to that a little further down the page), all the locations can be mapped to the area I live in and if you live round here then you can spot it easily and I also took influence from Bleach, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, 13 Reasons Why and X-Men among other things and that doesn’t even count the little side references, shout outs and unconscious influences. In fact later stories in the series have angels, cat-girls and djinns. So you see everything has a little of everything in it even if you aren’t aware of it so don’t stress if your idea sounds a little like something else.
Next up is where the ideas come from; as I said in the opening paragraph it can be from anywhere. The crane idea, which is always praised as really different and imaginative, comes from Digimon fanfiction.
Yeah I said it.
To elaborate I was writing an old fanfic called Digimon: Genesis that I kinda want to go back to just because of a few ideas I really liked but I probably won’t. In the finale the main two characters combined with their partners (which was the only way to digivolve in my universe) and then jogress/DNA digivolve together to win the day. For the longest time I had no idea what to use as the final result of this digivolution (all of them were modified versions of official Digimon but I wanted this to be an original creation) but I finally settled on a warrior with two swords called Hiro and Shima but I simply could not remember where I had got those names from until I looked it up. Hiroshima led me to Sadako Sasaki which led me to paper cranes which led me to the folklore behind it. I thought nothing of it at the time and dropped the fic soon after until a couple years later I was walking home from college when I got the idea for a story that deconstructs the idea of soul mates but didn’t really have a plot until the two collided in my head and the rest, as they say, is history.
The most important tool of the writing trade is a notebook that you keep on you and just write down your ideas as they hit you. You might not use them right away or even have a full story idea but nothing is worse than knowing you had the perfect idea to write but not knowing exactly what it was.
OK so again we haven’t really covered any actual writing yet so I can’t point you in the direction of some good examples but I do have a little task for you. Pick a window in your house and write down what you can see out of it and then using as much of those things in a story. It doesn’t have to be good or even make much sense but the point is to get used to making a story from the small things we see every day by putting them in a different context. It can be any genre even a fanfic. You don’t have to do this and it’s just a suggestion to help with your writing but if you want to post it in the comments or on your own blog and send me a link then I’ll be interested to see it and I’ll critique it best I can. As with any other challenges I set you I will also be doing it and posting it up later this week so look out for that.
I’ll cover the actual planning process next week and then we can get stuck into creating the world and the characters. I know a lot of you are probably impatient and just want to get writing and you may be able to do that well but I can’t and this is how I got good at writing so bare with me for now and we will get there soon. I’ll see you sometime this week for lesson 2.5: The window and next Wednesday for lesson 3: The questions. So for now I’m Silica and don’t go doing anything I wouldn’t.
Got to make one thing clear before we go anywhere; nothing is unique because it only exists in context with everything else. Whatever your religious and/or scientific views are of the beginning of the universe we all can agree that something came first right? Well whatever that thing was then it is the ONLY thing in all of history that is truly 100% unique and without anything similar to anything that came before purely because nothing did come before. Let’s take a look at my story Hear♀ and s♂ul; the cranes are based on Japanese mythology (I’ll get more in to that a little further down the page), all the locations can be mapped to the area I live in and if you live round here then you can spot it easily and I also took influence from Bleach, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, 13 Reasons Why and X-Men among other things and that doesn’t even count the little side references, shout outs and unconscious influences. In fact later stories in the series have angels, cat-girls and djinns. So you see everything has a little of everything in it even if you aren’t aware of it so don’t stress if your idea sounds a little like something else.
Next up is where the ideas come from; as I said in the opening paragraph it can be from anywhere. The crane idea, which is always praised as really different and imaginative, comes from Digimon fanfiction.
Yeah I said it.
To elaborate I was writing an old fanfic called Digimon: Genesis that I kinda want to go back to just because of a few ideas I really liked but I probably won’t. In the finale the main two characters combined with their partners (which was the only way to digivolve in my universe) and then jogress/DNA digivolve together to win the day. For the longest time I had no idea what to use as the final result of this digivolution (all of them were modified versions of official Digimon but I wanted this to be an original creation) but I finally settled on a warrior with two swords called Hiro and Shima but I simply could not remember where I had got those names from until I looked it up. Hiroshima led me to Sadako Sasaki which led me to paper cranes which led me to the folklore behind it. I thought nothing of it at the time and dropped the fic soon after until a couple years later I was walking home from college when I got the idea for a story that deconstructs the idea of soul mates but didn’t really have a plot until the two collided in my head and the rest, as they say, is history.
The most important tool of the writing trade is a notebook that you keep on you and just write down your ideas as they hit you. You might not use them right away or even have a full story idea but nothing is worse than knowing you had the perfect idea to write but not knowing exactly what it was.
OK so again we haven’t really covered any actual writing yet so I can’t point you in the direction of some good examples but I do have a little task for you. Pick a window in your house and write down what you can see out of it and then using as much of those things in a story. It doesn’t have to be good or even make much sense but the point is to get used to making a story from the small things we see every day by putting them in a different context. It can be any genre even a fanfic. You don’t have to do this and it’s just a suggestion to help with your writing but if you want to post it in the comments or on your own blog and send me a link then I’ll be interested to see it and I’ll critique it best I can. As with any other challenges I set you I will also be doing it and posting it up later this week so look out for that.
I’ll cover the actual planning process next week and then we can get stuck into creating the world and the characters. I know a lot of you are probably impatient and just want to get writing and you may be able to do that well but I can’t and this is how I got good at writing so bare with me for now and we will get there soon. I’ll see you sometime this week for lesson 2.5: The window and next Wednesday for lesson 3: The questions. So for now I’m Silica and don’t go doing anything I wouldn’t.