Hey everyone! I’m back again with another post! Sorry that this one was delayed a few days. I mentioned in my post last Friday about the delay a little bit of what happened. On Tuesday, my laptop kind of semi-crashed. The fan suddenly was overworking and everything slowed down to a snail’s pace. I had a really hard time writing let alone working. So, I was trying to borrow different family members' computers to do work and writing. I also went on vacation Thursday to Saturday last week so since I didn’t have time to write this post earlier in the week because of computer troubles it got delayed. But we are here! We finally made it! Look forward to two posts this week because of the delay! So, without further ado...
From Idea to Book: Developing a Concept
This post will hopefully be building off of the last one about how to find an idea. In this post I want to talk about how to take an idea once you have one to fully develop it into an idea for writing. This post will not include plotting. Plotting is the step that comes after developing a concept and that will be the subject of the post this Saturday.
No, today’s post is all about developing an idea. So, you might be asking, what’s the difference between getting an idea and developing an idea? And my answer would be, that’s a good question. In the last post we discussed two methods that I use personally to come up with ideas. Developing ideas is simply the next step of that process.
Finding ideas as mentioned previously can come from anywhere and so many of those ideas are not very usable on their own. Some of my most recent idea notes by themselves wouldn’t be a full book idea. For example, in my recent idea notes these are the notes exactly how they are written and in the order I wrote them.
“How long did the war last?”
“The end of the world came quietly. It came overnight and suddenly. So suddenly that there wasn’t time for alarms, chaos, screaming in the streets, news reports, or destruction. It happened instantly.”
“Story about a guy who wants to become the main character of a story so he tries all professions that this would normally happen to i.e., fisherman, Baker, huntsman, etc. But nothing happens. One day he discovers that he is actually the supporting character to someone else's story.”
These are all 3 different ideas from my book idea note. None of these by themselves are full book ideas. Although, some are closer than others. The third idea is much closer to a full book idea than the others but even that one isn’t quite complete with not real conflict or plot line. The first one isn’t even close to a full idea. It’s simply a question. The second one isn’t a developed book idea either. It’s simply a portion of writing that came to mind one day while sitting and thinking.
All of these are ideas. But none of them are book ideas. Every writer has a different way of coming up with developed book ideas from small little bits and pieces like this. I am going to share two methods that I have found that work the best for me personally.
Combining Previous Ideas
One of the things that I do that I have found that really helps me to develop ideas is combining several previous ideas. This works especially for me since I tend to write the same two or three genres over and over again and so a lot of my random thoughts, questions, or ideas are related to those two or three genres. This makes it particularly easy for me to combine them to create a more cohesive book idea.
For the current book that I’m writing I did this method. It’s titled Nine Remain. The title came from a name generator. Every once in a while, I go to random generators and generate character names, book titles, world names, creature species names, or other fun things and just keep lists of them in my idea folder for later. That’s where I found the title. The summary came from someone else at a summary/plot adoption forum. I adopted it and placed it on my idea sheet. The rest came in bits and pieces from other places. The quotes for the beginnings of the chapters come from several documents and word searches, the names were also names I had looked up previously and had in an idea sheet. Some of the scenes I had written some sort of similar version of before. Combining all of these I was able to develop a full plot idea that I can begin plotting.
This method works particularly well for me because I tend to write every single idea that I have down. For those who don’t write their ideas down as often as me don’t usually find this method quite as helpful as I do.
Brainstorming Small Ideas
The second way that I often develop book ideas is to take a small idea and brainstorm it until I can create it into a bigger idea. Take the first excerpt from my ideas list for an example. What was the war? Why does it matter how long it lasts? Why was the war significant (why was it significant for us to even need to ask the question of how long it lasted)? There are so many questions I could ask about that idea to help me ask even more questions that could help me to come up with even more of an idea.
Let's just say I was to think that the war was significant because it was the first war that humans fought against an alien species. Well, how long ago was this war? First war? So, there was more after that? How many alien species have humans fought? Why did the first one start in the first place? And now we have more and more questions to ask. Eventually we can get to the point where we can start asking, well who is my character? Why is the war significant to them? And then from there we can begin to see a full idea develop.
This is the second method that I typically would use to come up with a book idea. This idea requires more time to think creatively and just be in your head. When I’m particularly busy with work or school this method isn’t very useful and, in those cases, is actually more time-consuming than I would like and in those cases I would prefer to use the first method.
These are just two of the ways that you can develop an idea into a more fully developed book. There are plenty of other ways that different authors use to develop their ideas. If you have a particular method that you prefer for developing an idea, share it below. I love hearing new ideas!
That’s all for this post. I hope that this was helpful, and you learned something to help you to develop your ideas in the future. This Saturday we will be talking about the next step in this idea to book process which is plotting the idea that you’ve just developed. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the link on the bottom of the page. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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