How to take an idea and develop it into a novel

Anyone can have ideas – but how do you keep them relevant to your story without stifling your creativity?

I have talked on this blog before about building plots from a heap of ideas – but how do you go about generating those ideas in the first place? How do you push ideas to the limit and then generate new ones that facilitate the story you want to tell?

Here's a technique that may work for you – it has two phases: cultivate ideas until a workable plot idea emerges, then use that prototype plot to drive further ideas that develop it.

Like everything, it starts with the germ of an idea – a character, a scene, a theme – 'I want to write a book about blah, or I have this great idea for a character' etc. The key at this stage is to not rule anything out, no blocking of ideas at all, every idea must be tested and pushed and given equal weight. Nothing is too mundane – in fact, mundane is good – we must look for majesty in the mundane.

A brief example – lets decide we want to tell a love story; lets have a scene, a love-making scene – fairly pedestrian so far right? So let's work it harder – forget love let's make it a sex scene, on a kitchen table. More interesting. The man is married, but this isn't is wife – a little more dramatic – we're also starting to get a character here - but still adultery stories are fairly ubiquitous. So how can we twist this? Perhaps his wife knows and encourages his peccadilloes? Perhaps it excites her? So he reluctantly does these things for her. Now we're getting somewhere. Clearly our guy would be an accomplished lover but there would be an emotional and moral vacuum in his life waiting to be filled by – our female main character. Let's make her academic and wholesome – someone who's rejected the advances of men who desired her for her body, and went for someone who loved her for her intelligence – but there's part of her that's dissatisfied. We have a proto-plot emerging here – our Lothario is going to fall in love with Intelligence girl, but she's going to refuse him for some reason, he will either give up everything for her and end up with nothing, or they will end up together but at great cost.

Now here's where the next phase kicks in – once we've got enough character and story for a potential plot to emerge – we need to push it further. The proto-plot will suggest key turning points and will generate questions that need answering – how will these two to meet? what is it about this girl that makes him fall in love with her? why does she refuse him? All we need to do is provide as many answers to these questions as we can, until we find something earth-shattering.

As you can see, the idea is not to limit your thinking but to keep it focused on your original ideas with a view to developing your story and characters. And the great thing about it is at this stage you can throw it away more cheaply than 75000 words – but it's much more likely you'll come away with at least one thing you want to use, if not a treatment for a whole novel.

In summary:

1. Make the mundane unique or interesting to create complex and dramatic scenarios from which prototype plots can emerge.

2. These pseudo-plots will suggest key turning-points that generate story-questions that need answering - answer them as imaginatively as possible.

Ideas are cheap, it's what you do with them that counts.

The Chicken Factory - an Extract

As promised, an exclusive extract from my novel.

Sleep is impossible tonight. There is nowhere for me to go. I know the city too well, can't see beyond what I know, beyond to the places in between, places where someone could slip unnoticed.

So I walk and watch those who come out at night, watch them trying to capture something only the night can offer - love, lust, freedom - something dark and primal, something that can only be unleashed by intoxication and under the cover of darkness, when the city changes its face. Something that will dissipate in the starkness of morning, embarrassed and ashamed, when the real business of crawling safely to the grave begins. On a bus, or in a car, on your way to work. Slowly dying.

It's no surprise they come, looking for some dark magic, some release – to fight, to fuck, to feel alive – like moths with a single night to live.

Except this night lasts a lifetime.

I am here because I have to be. I'm not a tourist. I can see their fears, their hopes, their desperation. What they are looking for can't be found in the dark, in the bottom of a glass, in some contrived social ritual. If it comes at all, it will come unexpectedly. Happiness, joy, love – whatever it is. Unexpectedly.

I wander amongst them, avoiding contact. Killing time. Killing myself. The people come in hope, implode together in one sweating, writhing mass of expectation, before heading home disappointed.

Those still out amongst it become increasingly desperate, still hoping to find some human contact of significance, violent or sensual. All eventually surrender to the prowling taxis, already coralling the monsters inside themselves, back to their homes, normality.

I begin to walk uphill, out of the city. The buildings bigger, the roads wider. I work my way to higher ground, leaving the sprawl behind me, the darkness of night turning to the grey light of dawn. I find myself on Clifton Downs, space all around me, trees and grass, and I look across the Gorge, and see the bridge, and for that moment, that hell of humanity I've just crawled up from, looks like a beautiful corpse.

I hear the stifled roar of gas burns, see globes of fire on the horizon. Balloons, rising like fragile titans from the grey of the city below – all colour, all fire, all delicate hope. And I feel good that out of all that modernity, all that concrete and glass, all those machines, the harsh actuality of contemporary life, something so simple and uncomplicated can rise above it. Something as simple as that. Fire and air.

Hope you enjoyed - if you'd like to read more, you can do so here - normal service will be resumed next post.

Getting into the Writing Headspace

If you're like every other writer under the sun you most likely have to spend the majority of your waking hours doing something other than writing – either at a job to pay for food and clothing for yourself and your dependants, or raising the kids while someone else does. It's quite possible you may be doing both – more power to you.

Perhaps your day-job allows an easy transition from the work headspace into the writing headspace, perhaps you are indeed fabulously wealthy and can afford a more Byronic approach to the craft – if that's the case then you can move right along, because this is a post for those who drag themselves bleary-eyed and shattered to the keyboard – physically drained, mind exhausted or full of work-related stuff you just can't seem to clear out, your precious writing time zipping away.

We don't have time for that, we need our heads unencumbered so we can be imaginative and creative, even when what we really feel like doing is vegging in front of the telly or crawling under our duvets. Here are some things that work for me – they may just work for you too.

A glass of wine

Let's not mess about here, nothing cuts through a shitty day like a large glass of wine – just try not to drain the whole bottle, you need to take the edge off, not obliterate your faculties.

Exercise

It's almost boring the amount of writers who say they facilitate their writing or ease a block with a long walk but they do it because it works – a quick gym session, bike-ride or run will have the same effect. Sometimes I do some rather scary looking 'dynamic stretching' – which really means I'm waving my arms about to get some blood flowing through my neck, shoulders and back which can be just enough for me to squeeze out a hundred words – not much, but a hell of a lot more than nothing.

Music

This always works for me – nothing cleanses the mind and gets me thinking creatively than some awe-inspiring music.

Expressive Writing

This really is a good way of venting – in a diary, a notebook, a blog – getting things off your chest is a good way of purging while also flexing your writing muscles. I'm not a big-fan of writing as therapy, but if you can use that work noise in your head to do some writing other than the WIP it's no bad thing – you may even produce something you can use; you'll certainly clear your head enough to do what you came to the keyboard to do.

Use Your Journey Time

It's quite possible you can do all the things I've outlined above as you're on your journey home from work - although if you're driving I'd leave the wine - so that you can hit the ground running when you get to the keyboard. I find on my way home that if I force myself to think about the WIP, even though I may have all sorts of other nonsense on my mind, eventually I'll cut through it all and begin to get intrigued and excited about the potentials of my story again.

Chocolate

And you don't need me to tell you that chocolate makes everything more bearable.

Someone once told me that if you don't go to bed every night shattered with the pursuit of your dream, you don't deserve to get it. I like that idea, it means it's in our power to achieve it. So let's clear our heads.

Anybody else have any tips on getting the day's noise out of our minds?

Heart of Darkness

When generating ideas for stories and characters the writer has two resources available to him – experience and imagination - what he knows (or can learn) and what he can invent. These ready-made reservoirs of ideas can be stirred up with research, reading, reminiscing, or other cues - but essentially imagination and experience are the places a writer goes to for source material.

These two disciplines promote different aspects of fiction – experience lends itself to realism, imagination to romanticism (in the broadest sense of the word). The writer therefore has a heady cocktail of material that he carries right along with him wherever he goes.

It makes sense that if you augment these two reservoirs then you will naturally have a broader set of experiences and ideas with which to inform your writing – theoretically your work will be more believable via experience and more creative via imagination. These two disciplines require different means to extend them – experience needs feeding, and imagination needs exercising.

So a fastidious writer will spend his time day-dreaming while gobbling up experience like a starving man, right?

Obviously there are limits, and a wealth of experience and a fertile and well flexed imagination are only a part of being a writer – but there is a certain truth to this.

Which is why I think writers are drawn to the dark a little – preferring a tempest to a heat-wave; raking over past experiences to reinterpret and understand; embracing melancholy, longing, dissatisfaction (as well as happiness) to better feel and understand it; quizzing people with genuine interest about painful things that have happened to them, making one speculative remark too many at dinner-party conversations.

There is only so far you can go with experiencing the darker side of human nature without getting arrested, but with the imagination there are no limits – and this is where a writer will walk themselves into some pretty dark places.

Sounds grim, right? But as writers I think we are professionally obliged to do it – that's our job – to walk on the darkside (either for real or in our imagination, or both) and write about it - and hopefully by doing so we will say something that speaks to people about their everyday lives.