Making of Part 3: How do you come up with a story idea for a novel?

Welcome to entry number three in my sporadic “Making of” series, where I talk a little bit about different parts of the writing and self-publishing process, primarily using the development of my now-published fantasy novel The Wilderlands as a reference point.

In the first entry in the series I talked about the financial cost of self-publishing, in my second one I talked about why you need to have feedback from others when you’re writing.

Today, I want to cover a topic that probably should have been the first in this series: What can one do to come up with an idea for a novel?

Figure out what your story is about

Art by @cow_turtle_moo on Instagram.

It sounds obvious, but I absolutely recommend figuring out what your story is about before you start writing.

The “about” of it all might change over the course of the project (I’d be a little surprised if it didn’t) but if you identify why you’re writing a story, that point of purpose can be a guiding star.

In The Wilderlands, for example, I knew my “about” was: Characters with a significant cultural divide are forced to survive together in the wilderness after they both suffer tragedies. Similarly, I knew I wanted to contrast the unbridled Wilderlands with a civilization that had hidden itself behind walls, exasperating that contrast between the two settings. (I also knew I wanted the story to feel like an orally told tale with an unreliable narrator in a relatively short novel.)

Knalc, my main character, came to me pretty easily from that concept: A man who lives in a community that encourages violence where he himself (to a certain degree) resents that violence, but is good at it and requires it to survive.

Once Knalc was there, the other three characters came into focus, too. A set of siblings who watch their mother die at Knalc’s hands and a man in Red who was high born in the walled-civilization, but has since been shamed.

Find your main character

Art by @audeshattuck on Instagram, a.k.a. Fig & Fable.

This step is fairly interchangeable with the first. Sometimes you find the story structure before the character, sometimes it’s the other way around.

Let’s say you find your character first.

I’m going to hop over to my other book Light Keeper Chronicle: The Unspoken Prophecy to talk about how a character fits into a plot.

The main character of Light Keeper Chronicle is Lenzey Wright, a somewhat shy and nervous young girl from our world who finds out she the leader of powerful, mythical heroes (also children from our world) known as “The Element Keepers.”

Lenzey is not particularly assertive and is VERY squeamish at the notion of causing harm to someone else. She wants everyone to get along. Thus, when she is told she needs to be a leader and a warrior, she is put into a position where she needs to change. She needs to figure out what parts of her she’s willing to let go of to fulfill this task and what parts of this task she’s going to abandon in an attempt at some self-preservation.

Whatever other details, characters, and conflicts might emerge over the course of the book series, I know that that’s a core of my story and can revisit where things are on that journey if I ever get lost.

Keep a writers notebook

Sometimes, even when I have a story I know I’m excited about, I might realize I’m missing the characters I need to populate that story. Or I’ll realize I have a story, but the details of the conflict aren’t what they need to be. Or even that I just need a scene to be excited about.

This is where a writer’s notebook has saved my life.

I’ve been keeping a writers notebook for the past 17(ish) years and suspect I will for the rest of my life, even if I reach a period where I’m not actively writing.

It’s a notebook I carry with me most of the time so that, if I get an idea, I can get it out and jot it down before I forget.

That might be a bit of dialogue that doesn’t fit anywhere in particular, like: “I pray to forgotten gods—for what deity at their height could pity me?”

It might be a stray thought or description, like: If night were a woman, she would be the most beautiful of all. Dark skin flecked with crystalline freckles of light and a voice that was chirping and humming and buzzing and soft.

It might just be a set of words I like together, like: Half measures for total fools.

A writers note book is something I will flip back through if I realize a story is missing something. Think of it as a sort of spice shelf of ideas to the stew that is your story; it’s a place you can brows to find the right thing to add the exact right zing to your story.

Make sure it’s an idea you love

This last one is the most important.

Whether someone is writing for fun, or in hopes of being published, a writer is going to be spending, at minimum, HUNDREDS of hours with a story. You need to have an idea you love so unconditionally that, even in the moments where you hate it, you still love it.

Getting to this idea is the tricky part, and being sure you actually do love it that much can be even harder. (I have at least one mostly finished novel that I’ve accepted I don’t love enough to revisit it.)

The easiest recommendation is this: Think of your favorite book, album, movie, show, whatever—what is it about that piece of media that make you enjoy revisiting it over and over again? Does your idea have any of those qualities?

For example, Star Wars is one of my favorite things. Period. I think there’s a ton of flaws within it and I certainly love parts of it more than others, but I also know that I could probably watch and re-watch Star Wars shows/movies for the rest of my life and be quite happy.

One of the things I love about Star Wars is the infinite storytelling possibilities (which the franchise itself rarely executes on). While I don’t think The Wilderlands is really anything like Star Wars, that’s a characteristic I know I like in stories and thus infused into The Wilderlands: the sense that there could be any number of stories in this world and that the reader is sort of coming in at a random point.

I also love the action scenes in Star Wars—I feel like, more than any other movie franchise, I get a sense of character and narrative from a good fight in Star Wars. In The Empire Strikes Back, if you watch Luke fighting Darth Vader, you get the immediate sense that Luke is outmatched and that Vader is toying with him up until (perhaps) the very end where Luke is giving it everything to a degree that Vader has to try at least a tiny bit.

In both Light Keeper Chronicle and The Wilderlands, I tried to make it so that when characters fight you learn something about them. With Knalc in The Wilderlands, I want readers to get a sense that he is very skilled and very reckless, taking risks though should get him killed.

In Light Keeper Chronicle, Lenzey is usually hesitant, generally more concerned about other people in the fight (including her opponent) than she is about herself.

There’s a hundred other examples I could give, but the important thing is to make sure you love the idea and that there’s stuff you love writing about in the scenes you’re going to write!

*****

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The Wilderlands is available for physical purchase now from Barnes & Noble and Amazon or wherever you read ebooks. The audiobook is also out now on most major platforms.