Brainstorming Story Ideas

It’s not unusual to hear a speculative fiction writer say something like “I have so many story ideas I could never use them all.”

That writer is not me. For me, it’s more like “I have only a few ideas, and I use them all.”

I don’t have a library of story ideas floating around in my head. At best, I might have vague concepts, or some intentionality, but I have to hunt down the actual story idea. For example, “Nightside on Callisto” exists because I wanted to write a story set among the moons of Jupiter. No other reason. I had no character, no story background, no conflict, no goal. I just wanted to write a story in that setting, so I did some research, narrowed down the setting to Callisto, and started brainstorming.

Fast forward to last November: nearly six months had passed since I’d last written a short story so, to generate more story ideas, I decided to initiate a new writing exercise. I made a folder on my laptop called “Creative Oxygen.” Then I opened up a Word doc, saved it with the day’s date (20121109.docx for example, if proper sort order is one of your obsessions), and started writing.

The goal is to come up with a story synopsis — any story at all, no genre limitations, but figure out all the pieces: character, setting, story problem, beginning, middle, end.

The rule is non-stop writing sessions of ten minutes, fifteen minutes, maybe even twenty minutes. It’s not quite Write-or-Die, but very similar. Being obsessive, I actually set the alarm on my phone to go off after ten minutes. If I feel like continuing after the alarm, of course I do. If I want to take a break because I’m not getting anywhere, I do that too, comforting myself with the thought that at least I’m trying.

I use the “directed brainstorming” method, asking and answering questions, making statements and requests, evaluating what I’ve come up with, reiterating it in a clearer form, and asking myself over and over again, “So where’s the story? Is this a story?” And if nothing is coming, I just start typing in random things.

Hey, it works for me. Not all the time, of course, but often enough that I’ve used directed-brainstorming almost from the beginning of my writing career, usually to figure out the next chapter.

So anyway, I managed to do the creative oxygen exercise for all of three days in November, but those three days produced two story synopses. Then I went back to work on the novel and forgot about creative oxygen…until the end of the year when I was challenged to write one more story before we moved into 2013. So I pulled out one of the two story ideas — the one with the most solid, detailed synopsis — and wrote it. That turned into “Halfway Home,” which just sold to Nightmare Magazine.

The wild-eyed ideal would be to brainstorm a story synopsis every day — although a synopsis every week is probably more reasonable – but at any rate, to keep hammering at it, knowing you don’t have to actually write every story you come up with. It’s just that by pushing yourself and practicing creativity your ideas are likely to get better and better, until you come up with a synopsis that simply demands to be written into a story.

It’s a theory anyway. If you’re looking to generate ideas and develop them into stories, it might be worth a try.

There’s a theory out in the writing world that if you just keep writing, your subconscious will do all the heavy lifting, and out of the chaos a story will coalesce. Personally, I’m skeptical. Brainstorming sessions involving non-stop writing are great for generating ideas out-of-nowhere, and it’s not uncommon that I’ll get useful and spontaneous dialogs going between my characters this way. This is all very valuable stuff.

But…

I’ve spent several days now coaxing into existence characters, plot, scenes, and general ideas for the new novel-in-progress. I’ve got several thousand words in “brainstorming” files and, much to my surprise, over 6,000 words of actual story. The catch is, the story so far is neither continuous nor coherent. I’m envisioning a book in four parts. So far, I’ve got the opening scene and closing scene of part 1, a tiny bit of part 2, some in-between stuff, and lots of ideas for what else needs to be going on in the first 15,000 words or so. But the ideas that I have are not organized. The conflicts aren’t clear. The groundwork on which the remainder of the novel will rest is not at all well-established.

So it’s time for some heavy lifting, which unfortunately for me is a conscious process. I would love it if my subconscious would take over plotting, but it hasn’t happened yet. For me, this is the fallacy of words-per-day writing goals. If I’m unsure of the details of the plot, or if I don’t have a real vision of the next scene, knowing what to write about is problematical.

So I’m off to try to hammer disparate ideas together into a coherent opening plot, in the hope that I can get to the point where writing the scenes is like taking dictation. That happened last night when I wrote the closing scene of part 1. Usually, writing is hard. When it’s not – when a scene just flows – that’s a rare reward, and one of my favorite moments of the writing process.