"How do you get your ideas?"
Apr. 3rd, 2003 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deathpixieSomething I was thinking about today - how do other writing people get their ideas? Not the actual idea for a story; I mean to process after, the process of elaborating and expanding that initial "Hey, wouldn't this make a good story".
What prompted it was I had another one of my flashes this morning - those sudden intuitive leaps that connect one part of a story with another, in a way that you've apparently been leading up to all the time, without realising it. It's how I plot; I get the initial idea, construct a rough plot around it (kind of a Start and End, with various scenes I want in the Middle), and then start writing. The bits in the middle are filled in with these starburst flashes, where I've obviously been thinking about various problems with the plot in some forgotten corner of my brain, and then when I have the answer, it leaps out at me. Usually when I'm just waking up or in the shower or riding into work.
So, now I'm curious (and bored - I ran out of work and my inbox is empty) - how do you write?
What prompted it was I had another one of my flashes this morning - those sudden intuitive leaps that connect one part of a story with another, in a way that you've apparently been leading up to all the time, without realising it. It's how I plot; I get the initial idea, construct a rough plot around it (kind of a Start and End, with various scenes I want in the Middle), and then start writing. The bits in the middle are filled in with these starburst flashes, where I've obviously been thinking about various problems with the plot in some forgotten corner of my brain, and then when I have the answer, it leaps out at me. Usually when I'm just waking up or in the shower or riding into work.
So, now I'm curious (and bored - I ran out of work and my inbox is empty) - how do you write?
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I have no idea.
Date: 2003-04-03 06:23 am (UTC)The initial idea generally comes about as "wouldn't it be cool". I usually know if it's an actual Idea (as opposed to a brain burp) if it refuses to go away after a few days, and instead builds on itself.
By this time, I usually have a rough idea of how the story is supposed to begin. Endings aren't as important, at least not until I have somewhat more than 50kb (ie first chapter or so) written. So I just sit down, and write. Whether or not I'll actually use that beginning is debatable, but at least I'm writing.
And after a while, I just run out of steam and stop. This usually happens somewhere around the first hundred kilobytes, which is enough to make me want to finish the story. Then I start throwing out random what-if ideas, and writing out scenes (inspired by various things, and hacked and modified to fit) that would work well in the middle or at the end. (This is where most of my "story snippets/teasers" come from.) Sometimes, when all else fails, I just think about how the presentation of the story is to be done, and start HTMLing.
Getting from where I left off to a particularly juicy scene is probably the hardest part of ficwriting. There are a few fics that are in that particular limbo, either on indefinite hold or being written one sentence at a time.
Of course, if a story is utterly beyond all hope of recovery, then I scrap the story, but use the idea in another of my fic universes (four at last count, not including shared realities, so there is probably no lack of targets). And then I rewrite the scenes to fit their new home, and try to work towards them. Rinse, lather and repeat.
I don't often have a Starburst, but when I do, that moment is sweeeeeeet.