Resisting the New Shiny: How to Decide What to Write Next

 I've just returned from Nebula Conference and this moment was a highlight: the photograph of SFWA past-presidents in attendance. From left is Gay Haldeman, SFWA Ombudsman; Joe Haldeman, SFWA Grandmaster and past-president; Michael Capobianco, past-president; Karen Silverberg, novelist; Robert Silverberg, SFWA Grandmaster and past-president; and lil' ol' me. Quite a heady experience!

This week at the SFF Seven, we're talking about the Picking and Choosing—how do you decide which idea to write?

This is the eternal question, with many factors affecting the answer.

Some factors are practical, especially if you make your living as a writer, as I do. To keep that income flowing, I have to think about the next book in the series - both for the sales and to keep my readers happy - and I have to look at what's selling best for me. Likewise, in working with my agent - the fabulous Sarah Younger at Nancy Yost Literary Agency - I coordinate with her on what she thinks she can sell for me, along with her schedule, balancing me with her other clients on reading, editing, etc.

Then there's the creative side...

As we develop as writers, one of the primary skills and disciplines we must learn is how to *finish* a work. There are a lot of would-be authors out there with a few to dozens of unfinished manuscripts. It's a thing and you HAVE to learn to overcome it. A big piece of learning to finish a work is setting aside the New Shinies - the ideas that turn up, alluring as fae lights in the darkness, luring the unwary writer into a merry chase that leads nowhere. By the time the writer returns from the wild pursuit of flickering delight, their work in progress has aged and they have nothing to show for their efforts.

Then again...

Sometimes an idea descends and demands to be written. It's only happened to me a few times, but it's happened recently and - though I have lot practice, skill, and discipline at resisting the siren song of the New Shiny - I finally capitulated to writing it. We'll see what happens.

Idea Recall

Just a flower about to burst into bloom on the lanai. I was told it was a form of orchid. To be sure, it's an epiphyte, but I'm not so sure about the orchid thing. It's a Medinilla magnifica.

I'm using this photo here because I want to make the point that ideas are as numerous as the clusters of flowers on this plant. You either enjoy them when they bloom or you lose them when they drop, which happens frequently. Like so many tropical and subtropical plants, the flowers don't all come out at once. They emerge in waves and they drop in waves. No sooner have you swept up one mess of rose grapes, which these are also called, and another set are falling.

There's my idea metaphor.

Gather ye the buds of ideas while ye may. Cause sure as you sleep on 'em, they'll be gone like ghosts in the rising sun. Waking life ideas are easy. Say you're in the shower. You get an idea followed by another and another. Those ideas are related or they wouldn't have triggered one another. NUMBER THEM in your head. Assign each a single key word. REPEAT THEM. Then finish your shower asap, GTFO, and find paper. Or whatever recording device you need. Your phone has a recorder on it. Record the idea. There's a notes app. Use that if you have to. I prefer either paper or just getting an idea to a computer. The whole strategy for me is to find just that one single key word that opens out the entire idea when I repeat it.

But. As I said. The One Thing Guaranteed to Fail: lying to yourself about remembering that idea that comes to you in twilight sleep - in that moment between waking and dropping into slumber. You don't want to rouse yourself. So you number the ideas. You key word them. You repeat them. And when your alarm goes off, all you'll remember is that you had ideas and now, they're gone. The only solution here is a pad of paper beside the bed and a book light. I used to use sharpie and write on my palm when I got ideas in the middle of the night. That gets really, really hard to read when you write over something you've already written, so seriously, don't do that. A little note book and an unobtrusive light source will make  you much happier and you won't hate yourself in the morning.

Grabbing Those Great Ideas

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is all about Ideas. How do you write down or remember those great ideas that you get mid-shower/dream/car drive? If you lose them, how do you get them back?

It's funny this came up now because I talked about this very thing on my podcast, First Cup of Coffee, just recently - and even commented that I liked what I'd talked through so much that I should transcribe it. So this gave me the impetus to do that - and edit the transcription, which is the time-consuming part.

If you prefer to listen, you can listen here. Or, read on for the transcription! I included the whole thing, but set off the relevant section in bold, in case you don't care for a faithful reproduction of my conversational rambling.

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Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. It's Thursday, July 2, and I am back in my grape arbor and my folks are on the road this morning. So the staycation is over. I'm getting back to work today.

It's good to have a little bit of fallow time. But now I am ready to get after it. I have not yet gotten edits back from editor Jennie on The Promised Queen. She said she thought maybe week of June 29. But seeing is how it's Thursday. It might be next week. Which I told her whenever is fine, and that's really true. So that means that I can start in on one of my other projects today, because Lost Princess released on Monday, and thank you all for the wonderful reception for that book.

I can't tell you how happy it makes me to have the book earn out on release day, or a little before, as some of that's before because when you guys buy through my website, I get that money right away. But to go ahead and recoup all of my costs on that first day of release is wonderful, because then after that I can consider it all income. And that's, that's just incredibly useful. So thank you all. And I'm glad that you're happy with the book. And so far, nobody seems to feel cheated.

I won't spoil or anything but there was something I had hoped I'd be able to do with that book. And I just couldn't figure out a way to make make it happen. Although I've received suggestions from several people. Spoiler: cover your ears for just a second if you haven't read it yet. I've received suggestions from several people on how to actually get elephants to Dasnaria. It could happen We'll see. Okay, now you can all come back.

So, yeah, I'm feeling rested, tanned, rested and ready. It's an old joke. Uh, yeah, it's um, it's actually a, like a Nixon joke, I think. Which tells you something. It also tells you something when our political climate is such that we long for the simplicity of Nixon who simply resigned in disgrace and flew off of this helicopter. Ah, the good old days. Right.

So, I will get back into the groove now.

The projects I'm thinking about working on are: going back to Dark Wizard which, I think I told you all, that Grace Draven wants me to just call it Dark Wizard. We're arguing about this. She says, I should just title it Dark Wizard. I'm like, you can't just name a book Dark Wizard. And so then I've started playing with variations on that, you know, a little bit of gamesmanship with wordplay, etymology, you know, sort of like Darth Vader, you know, it could be like Darth. Of course, I can't use Darth because that it immediately evokes Star Wars. But the working title is definitely Dark Wizard. And then I also got another great idea for a story that I don't know what my working title for it should be. But I think it's a really good idea. You know, like one of those ones that zings. Oh no, I started to mention it when I drove in for writer coffee last Thursday, I talked about it some and then I decided that there was too much noise on the podcast and I didn't put it up.

That's one thing about taking some time off and letting the well refill is that sometimes you just get these ideas that pop into your head. And this is one that comes a little bit out of my mentoring session too at SFWA's Nebula conference.

So, I think it's really good idea. I'm tempted to try again. I mean, I know my 3000 words a day is sustainable. I'm definitely going to try to do 3000 words a day. I'll get back into the groove on Dark Wizard - and I'm thinking about trying for more words again later in the day on this new story, on the new shiny. I don't know how that would work. I definitely can't do it right off. And there's probably nothing wrong with letting the idea percolate. Kelly Robson said something about that when I told her I had a new idea. You know, the really good writer friends are the ones who, when you tell them that you have a great new idea, they don't ask you what it is. Because they know better. They know that you're still sort of sitting on the egg as it were. And I do think that there's a possibility of sitting on an egg so long that it goes bad, you know that it's a dud. But I think that if that -

Okay, so here we're going to extend the analogy.

If you're sitting on an egg so long that nothing happens and it's a dud, then I think it was always a dud.

The really good ideas, if you sit on them for a long time, eventually, they're going to start picking their way out of the, the shell. And by that you will know. Different writers are different ways about those things. And you know how I'm always talking about, own your process. Discover what your process is, own it. Keep refining it.

And I feel like this is a lifelong process for all of us. I kind of gave my I finished teaching my class on Identifying and Breaking Bad writing habits. In my rousing goodbye screed, I talked about this, that as much as we would like - and I'll tell you what I am so this person: I want to buy thing and then have it for the rest of my life. I want to be able to learn something and then know it. I want to build a habit, and then have it. And I don't get to have that.

This is not how the universe works, to my great consternation. And with all of these things, it's because building habits and refining your creative process are our processes. And they are iterative. So this means that you keep going back over and over and you keep checking and rechecking to see how they're doing. See how you are doing. Are you still being productive? Is that thing that worked before still working? How can you tweak How can you maximize? How can you maximize in terms of not increasing output, but improving output, which I think is a different thing. You know, like Leslye Penelope, she's been talking about that she just took a break, that she took a couple of weeks off and she's been reading and enjoying herself, that crop rotation idea of letting the fields lie follow. Deanna Rayburn talks about that, that she took like a couple of years off writing, and only read. And I think that those things are very important as part of discovering your process, and refining all of these things.

Every round is different. So it's very tempting to listen to other writers and say, Okay, here's how you do the thing. Like, you know, I had one of the students in my class ask saying, Well, when I do a really detailed outline, I find I lose interest in the story and I struggled to finish it. You know that's a question that we get all the time. This comes up all the time. And it's, it's so funny, because the obvious answer is, then don't do a detailed outline. Your process does not involve doing a detailed outline beforehand. But people get so wrapped up in the idea that that is how you do the thing, that you do this thing by making a detailed outline. And they think that the problem is is is somehow in how they're executing. And it's like, No, no, this is not your creative process.

Figure out what your creative process is.

Own it.

Don't let other people tell you how you should be doing the thing.

So along with this idea of like sitting on, on new ideas, John Scalzi has a very interesting approach. He said that he gets an idea. And he thinks about it a little bit, and then he puts it away. And then if it's still there in the morning, he gives a little bit more thought and then puts it away. And then if it's still there a week later, he gives a little bit more thought and puts it away. And he'll do this for months or a year.

And I thought, well, that's a that's an interesting approach.

Some people I know, like my friend Darynda, she gets ideas, and she has to go ahead and write out a pretty detailed outline of the idea before it'll leave her alone. I don't know if she's still doing that. I should ask her if she's still doing that. We haven't done an interview with her in a couple of years, we should get her back on here. Because these things change, right? That's the most important thing is that these things change over the course of our writing career as we refine our process. You know, so the upshot was is that Darynda has something like 60 plus book outlines on her hard drive, which even she acknowledges is not super productive, because she won't have time to write all of them. But that's it's part of how ideas seize her and how she deals with them. So it would be very interesting to ask her if she's still doing it that way. I will try to remember to make a note poke her and see if she wants to do an interview. I haven't seen her in so long . When was the last time I saw Darynda? January, I guess? Yeah. So it'd be nice to have a nice a good long conversation. And you guys might as well listen in.

I usually the jot down a few notes on the idea, because I will forget it. And that's where  Scalzi would say, well, then it deserves to be forgotten. And I'm not sure I believe that's true. Because sometimes I will go back to my spreadsheet of ideas. And I'll think, oh, that is a great idea. And I'll write down just enough words to make it come alive for me again, and I think I would lose those and I'm not sure that they should be lost.

So then Elizabeth Gilbert talked about - I'll see if I can find the link to this podcast. I think it was like two years ago that I was reading her, maybe just a year. I know, I was doing a podcast on listening to her audio book, which I can't think of the name of now. It's the one on that's kind of like about creativity and magical thinking. (BIG MAGIC) But anyway, she has this idea that that ideas come to you and kind of lurk and wait. And if you don't pay attention to them - she thinks of them as like living things - that if you don't pay attention to them, then they leave and they go find someone else. That was it: she had said that Ann Patchett ended up writing her idea because she didn't get to it, and that it was uncannily close to her own idea.

It makes for a fascinating story.

I'm not sure I believe that, but I kind of like my egg analogy. Part of what I'm thinking about now is okay, I'm working to this idea is like, does it hurt to write down a few thousand words to get the story started and then poke at it every once in a while. I know writers who do this, but I'm thinking back to one concept I had that I did that on, and it did kind of die and lose impetus. So maybe it'd be better to keep it fully in the egg. Maybe this is part of it. It's like, once it starts, once you crack that egg, you know, it's okay to let the idea incubate in the egg. But once you crack that egg, then you either have to feed your little baby bird regularly, insects all the time, like my bluebirds ferry insects to their babies.

Or it'll die. You have to.

That's an interesting concept. So I like the idea of keeping the idea eggs. So thanks guys! You just helped me solve this problem. And, for your information, in case you didn't know, this is exactly how all of my conversations with my friends go: where I ask them questions and they say things and then I arrive at the answer and and thank them and they're like I just sat here and listened to you talk. So you guys are all doing this for me. All right, I won't try to do more than 3000 words a day, because that really does work best for me. It's very sustainable, and it's good. And even though I didn't get that much written the last couple weeks of June. I still am way ahead of last year. So I've been doing much better And on that note, I think I will go get to work today. I need to, I want to get 3000 words on Dark Wizard if I can. And because there's always the ramp up factor, you know, it's just as yesterday morning, I ran on the treadmill again for the first time and today I lifted weights and my body is feeling a little creaky because I've mostly been like, shopping and going out to eat and drinking wine. So, physically and creatively, I am waking up those creaky muscles and getting back to it. So all right: I am getting back to work.

I'll remind you that first cup of coffee is part of the Frolic Media Podcast Network, and you can find more podcasts you'll love at frolic.media/podcasts and I will talk to you all tomorrow. Promise. Okay, take care. Bye bye.

Who Do You Trust with Your Work?

This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking: how do you know who to trust with your writing, especially early drafts and idea bouncing.

This is similar to a question I get all the time, which is how to pick critique partners and how many I use, including beta readers, etc.

The short answer is that this has changed quite a bit over the course of my career. I've been a member of two different critique groups that met IRL, and I've been part of various clusters of critique partners and beta readers online.

Another short answer is that who I discuss my ideas with or share work with at various stages changes all the time, and varies depending on the type of story and what I need help with. I'm blessed with a number of writer friends at this point who can read for me, and give me what I need, usually blazingly fast, too.

I can also say that I've grown extraordinarily picky about who I bounce ideas with and who I ask to look at early drafts. This is because - and I've used this analogy before - stories in their earliest stages are like infants. Their skulls are still soft and they are fragile beings that must be carefully tended. Just as you'd never hand your newborn child to just any person on the street, you don't want just anyone giving your fragile new idea a good, hard shake.

There is a time and necessary function to the good, hard shake - but that's akin to the college years, when you figure they've got to get drunk and pass out on the couch at the fraternity house at least once and learn some lessons from it.

But not the baby story. The baby story needs love and nurturing. It needs someone who can see the potential and not that dreadfully bulging forehead. I even left one IRL critique group because I felt they were having a negative impact on my work, instead of a positive one.

That's not the topic question, though, right? The question is how do you know who to trust?

There are no easy or short answers to that one, though I'm very much looking forward to hearing what advice my fellow SFFers have to offer. It took me a long time to decide to leave the crit group that wasn't working for me. It can be difficult to separate the very real reaction most humans have to criticism from the intuition that something is having a very real negative impact.

None of us like to have our work criticized, even if we are privately pissed that they passed out on the fraternity house couch. Learning to receive criticism and use it effectively is a huge part of learning to be a professional author.

But not all criticism is useful, and it's not always kindly meant.

So, that's how I decide: I consider the source and their intentions. If feedback from someone feels negative or unkindly meant, I pay attention to where they are with their own work. Are they feeling good about the work they're doing? How do they critique other people's work? Are they otherwise supportive of me and seem genuinely pleased for my successes?

That last question is key, and helped me to decide to leave that group. When I mentioned a success, these same people were sour and unsupportive. I knew then that their criticism of my writing felt negative because it was.

When you figure that out, walk away. Don't trust them with anything fragile again.

The Origin of Story

Story starts in darkness, in the cracks of the self. In nightmares and in dreams. Story starts in everything I believe I hate. It starts in all the self-loathing that drifts through the gray matter spiraling up and flashing like fireflies signaling for mates. It coalesces into noxious fruit I can pluck and examine. Until I learned better, I used to consume that terrible fruit and feed the monsters living inside. Somewhere along the path, and this probably saved my life, I learned to hold the nastiness in my hand and instead ask, "How is this useful?"

The answer is that it's useful in creating characters and plots and conflicts. You'd think I'd be writing horror based on this, but I'm not all snakes, spiders, and blood dripping down the walls. There's the other side of the coin - the deeply, (maybe naively) optimistic part, wanting to believe the best of everyone and everything at all times. That's where the romance and the HEAs come from. The dead bodies and violence are courtesy of the shadow version of me that loves nothing more than to stab happy me in the back with grotesque nightmares and manipulative old awful thought patterns. You know those memes about "Oh, you're trying to sleep? Here let me replay the past 20 years of everything you've done wrong, ever." That's the shadow's favorite weapon.

Grab that weapon, though, turn it over in your hand and ask how it applies to the book you're writing right now - where does my character feel like this - and the blade dulls. It doesn't hurt as much when your shadow tries to stab you with it again. Since I'm doing my best to pretend this is all totally normal and not that I might out to be trussed up in a fancy white jacket, I want to hope this resonates with readers. I hope that my characters and stories and conflicts feel true. Even if the beings experiencing them are darting around the galaxy.

Speaking of which. Guess who got a cover for Enemy Games, Chronicles of the Empire Book Two? This is the first look. Isn't it pretty?? Can I just shout out how much I adore my cover artist, Debbie Taylor?

The release date for this book is October 16, 2019. If you've read this book, I did some rewrites that altered a few scenes. It doesn't change the trajectory of the plot in any way. But there are changes. If that sort of thing matters to you.

The Dream List

Y'all, I just turned in The Book I Thought I'd Never Finish. Does that one count? No? Okay. Projects I want to work on:

1. For a decade I wanted to finish the arc of the SFR series I started in 2010. Now, thanks to The Wild Rose Press, I get to do that. We'll see whether it was worth the wait. At this point, there are only two books left to write - one for Colonel Kirthin Turrel and one for Her Majesty Queen Eilod Saoyrse. That's about all I can say about those books at this point.
2.  There are a couple of hot novellas that happen in the same story universe as the SFR novels. I have two of those stories at least half done. Now I want them finished. The sexy shorts are a lot of fun. I find them to be great palate cleansers after the bigger novels. But these guys don't have a contract. The novels do. So these two take a number and stand in line.
3. There's a little piece of weird sitting on my hard drive called The Curse of the Lorelei - It's spy versus spy during an oddly haunted Civil War. It's meant to be a slow burn romance that takes a couple of books to pay off. I have the first book done, but it needs a little finessing before it sees the light of day. But. Contract for other books, right? Again. This book takes a number and stands in line.

All of this is predicated on the notion that I never again have an idea that grabs me by the throat and threatens me into writing it.

Story Ideas Versus Contest Entries

Tis the season for conferences and their contests again. Thus it is also the season for volunteering to judge for a few of those contests. This plugs neatly into this week's topic.

I will observe, as Marshall did - ideas are not the problem. At least not often. There IS a contest entry this year that is deeply, deeply problematic but none of the judges are sure whether it's an idea problem or an execution problem. The take away is that if this entry is meant as satire, the writer didn't have the chops to pull it off. But outside of that, none of us has yet run across an entry over years of this contest that has resembled any other entry we'd ever read. It doesn't matter how simple an idea is. What matters is the idea twisted through an author's unique perspective. That makes the story.

Where contest entries seem to run into problems is exactly where KAK pointed. Execution. You'd think you could come up with an idea for a book and then faithfully follow it from beginning to end. You'd think. Take a poll among authors. Find out how many of us end up losing sight of the ball and wandering in the weeds trying to recall what it was we were supposed to be looking for in the first place. The critique for most contest entries tends to be about lack of narrative drive - the author losing the through line and/or not giving the protagonist enough drive. The protagonist has to want something and want it badly enough to sustain 75-100k words. It's easy to say, tough to do.

I suspect this is why writing courses will never go out of business. It's easy to be convinced you need narrative drive. It's totally another to figure out how to execute that, assimilate the information, and then turn it into execution so effortless that it becomes a natural part of your voice. I get to say this because it's still a -- let's say -- development opportunity for me.

My as yet imperfect strategy for narrative drive is to ask character questions:
1. What does the protag want?
2. What does the protag need? (This may not be known to the protag - it often isn't at the beginning of a book.)

If I can answer those questions, I figure I might be on the right track. To somewhere.

Story Ideas: Problem Isn't The Concept; It's The Execution

Where Do I Get My Ideas?

For the high-concepts of stories? From my over-active imagination that is stimulated by life. The mundane morphing into the unusual, the ordinary that could shift to extraordinary with one tweak, the existential questions with practical answers, and the immediate concerns forgotten with a greater crisis; it's all fodder for a novel. An idea shortage is not a problem. An excess of ideas? Now there's a problem. Choosing which one(s) to pursue next? Choosing which ones to smash together into a new thing? Choosing which ones to abandon and which ones to beat into submission? Which ones get the investment of time and money? Which ones get pushed to the back of the queue? Which ones can be written in a timely manner and which ones will be long labors of love?

For the details of the story? Oh, now, this is the problematic part. The execution of the Great Concept. Again, abundance is the root of the trouble. Which path to trod? Which is unique without being alienating? There are drafts with whole tangents that seemed like a good idea that ended up not being compelling, that failed to develop the character, or that developed the character in such a way that the character is quite unlikeable. Sometimes, it's a lot of stabbing at shadows until one coalesces. "Would she really...?" is frequently uttered. Would my protag really react like that, go there, engage in that manner, solicit help, endanger that group, etc. How is my protag vulnerable without being weak? How is she competent and inclusive? How does she empower others to succeed? What is it she fears and how is that going to manifest? How does she deal with fear? How does she grow across the series without outgrowing the series?

Strangely enough, I can make a pretty swift command decision about which high-concept project I'll pursue. The details? Thems what makes writing a book a real challenge. Yet the magic happens when the brain is allowed to think, to truly muse and ponder. 

And bourbon, bourbon helps too. 😈

A Better Answer to: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Last week I attended SFWA's Nebula Conference and got to meet our 2018 Grandmaster, Peter S. Beagle. I legit teared up when we talked and he signed my battered old copy I received forever and a day ago. I felt like a teenager again and all those feelings that led into my early love of fantasy rose up and swamped me.

The conference in 2019 will be at the Marriott Warner Center in Los Angeles. I highly recommend it! It's become my absolute favorite gathering of SFF writers and industry professionals.

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is "Where do you get your ideas - the least popular question ever."

Whoever suggested this topic added the subtitle because a) writers get asked this question a LOT, and b) it's really hard to answer. One reason is because we don't actually KNOW where we get our ideas. We often laugh off answering it, or glibly say something like "Getting the ideas is easy; it's having the time to write them that's the challenge."

Which is a really terrible way to answer an earnest question. People who ask this get nothing from us assuring them that ideas are common as grass. They want to know where we get GOOD ideas. How to know which ideas to run with. What story to tell when they're looking at a blank page or screen. They also want to know how they can get an idea like Twilight, or Harry Potter, or Hunger Games.

Something we'd ALL like to know!

I recently listened to an interview with Neil Gaiman where he talked about this very thing. (Yeah, it's a few years old. So what? The internet lives forever!) He was asked to talk to a group of schoolchildren and one asked this question. And Gaiman said it occurred to him that it wouldn't be fair to give them the usual non-answer, because kids deserve better than that. Really, anyone who asks this question deserves better than that.

So, where do *I* get my ideas? Here's three.

I pay attention to my dreams and write them down. If there's an image/feeling powerful enough that I remember it clearly when I wake, I know there's something to it. THE MARK OF THE TALA, the first in my Twelve Kingdoms/Uncharted Realms series started with a dream. So did ROGUE'S PAWN from my Covenant of Thorns trilogy.

I enjoy my daydreams and give them time to spin. As we grow up, we're talked out of daydreaming, like it's a bad thing. We're told to pay attention and engage with others. But daydreaming is where a lot of my stories come from. They entertain me and give me good feelings, so those naturally become stories I enjoy writing. This works especially well with erotic fantasies. PETALS AND THORNS, SAPPHIRE, and UNDER CONTRACT came from erotic daydreams.

I get a lot of ideas from reading other people's books. No, it's not plagiarism if someone inspires you. I once heard a Famous Author on a panel proclaim that she doesn't read. (She called it a dirty, little secret of authors and seemed to think others thought the same way. Spoiler: we don't.) She believed reading somehow spoiled her own creativity. In the bar after (where all the best writer conversations occur), another author said "We're rich because we steal from the best houses." And, no, it's not really stealing. Art inspires art. Good books - and great movies - suggest ideas to me all the time. Don't go and replicate someone else's plot, but if something inspires you, run with it!

As much as we may riff that we get ideas all the time, most writers are always looking for new and better ones. They may be common as grass, but there's a lot of grass out there. We're all looking for something more special than that. Don't let any writer convince you otherwise.

Idea Processing and Proving

Remember junior high when you learned (vaguely) how to write a research paper? You were told to pick a subject, begin your research and keep your index cards organized so you could write your paper and cite your sources, right? For the first time, you were given more than a single evening to accomplish your task. Maybe a whole two weeks.

If you were anything like me, you spent the first week and a half playing with a million ideas about what to write. It finally took either panic or a parent hollering at you to just pick something to get you to actually do the paper. Which meant that you were forced to put aside any question of what idea was 'best'. Or even 'good'.

Books are a little like that. You can spend all your time figuring out whether an idea is any good for you or not. And I say 'for you' because I doubt there are any bad ideas - only ideas that land with the wrong person to execute. When a bright, shiny new idea sideswipes me, I do have a process for figuring out whether I can get it from 'oh hey!' to a finished novel. It looks a little like this:

1. Are there characters associated with the idea? If yes, proceed to 2. If no, this idea is DOA. I can jot it down and file it in case characters pop up later, but until there are people to drive the idea, no deal.
2. Do the characters have arcs? This is determined by a deep dive into character work. First stop: Break Into Fiction and the character templates. Why? Because I am entirely character driven. I must know the whys behind my people before I can reliably plot a story from idea to finish. If arc = yes, I can proceed to 3.
3. Proof of concept - write the proposal. Three chapters and a synopsis. This forces me to get clear on the GMC in a concise way. Usually. If that goes well and the characters are playing poorly with one another as they should, I can proceed to 4.
4. Scene by scene plotting. You know that's working when you have help like I did above. It's even better when your 'help' offers up editorial comment in the shape of fang holes in your scene notes.

A lot of work, maybe, but it has benefits. The first is that 90% of ideas get sorted within the first two steps. Those that don't have material progress already made on them. In rare cases, I've had ideas fizzle in the proof of concept stage. Those ideas aren't usually bad, per se, it's usually a case of having missed something vital in the character arc/motivation stage. Those get shelved to perk a little longer. Then I go back to revisit every once in a while to see if I can parse out what I got wrong.

At least no one wants me to cite my sources anymore.

3 Steps for Deciding Which Great Idea To Write Next

I have an idea! I have many ideas. I have enough to keep me writing well into my 90s when AI will suck the wavelengths out of my brain and feed it to the matrix. The ideas, they multiply like tribbles. In all fairness, I've yet to meet an author who lacks ideas. Time is usually the mitigating factor, followed by contractual commitments, and the pursuit of a guaranteed income stream.

Obligations to third-parties aside, how do I decide which idea to work on first/next? Three steps:


1. Can I easily and clearly envision the Goal, Motivation, Internal Conflict, and External Conflict?

 If "yes" proceed to next step...

I proceed 96% of the time

2. Can I easily and clearly envision the summaries of the 3 Arcs, their respective Gotchas, and are they sufficiently unique?

If "yes" proceed to next step...

I proceed 43% of the time

3. Can I write it in 90 days?

 If "yes" prioritize and place in the queue to be written.

The answer to this one is usually manic cackling and a lot of "oh, hell no." Not because I'm a slow writer and so far my "best" time is 18 months. No, no, that piece of reality doesn't factor in. It's my belief that I could write it in 90 days. That belief stems from the notion that I am so familiar with the plot, all the characters, and each setting that I know how 27 of the 30 chapters are going go before I start Chapter 1.

That...that doesn't happen often, which makes it a great filter. 

What I don't ask myself is "will anybody buy this," for the simple reason that I can't control what people will buy or when they'll buy it. I can control my little speck of the universe...sometimes.