I was going to write this post about outlining a novel, but, as I am sitting here mulling it over, I realize I am thinking less about how to list things in the order in which you want them to occur and more about where ideas come from and how they evolve into a story. New writers or wannabe writers or people who can't even imagine writing often ask the question of authors: where do you get your ideas? The answers vary. Everywhere. Everything. Prayer and fasting. Magic.
For me, a story sometimes begins with a very basic, simple idea and a huge dose of emotion that is connected with that idea. That single thought and feeling wrapped up together are the seed that eventually becomes a novel. As a writer, I take that idea and intense emotion and water it with imagination and literary devices. It begins to grow. It may be a hot mess at first, a wild thing, uncaged and untamed, but I trim it and coax it and reshape it until it feels as finished as I am able to get it.
Allow me to explain by telling you the story of how Winterborn became a story.
When I first conceived the idea of Winterborn, I was extremely upset. Nothing was working right. Feeling that it was the right thing to do, I'd gone back to school for my Master's and spent two and a half years working full time and spending ridiculous gobs of time on projects required for school without a minute to actually have a life. In spite of my GPA being only .031 points shy of perfection due to receiving a score of 25 for turning in a paper five minutes late and missing class because I had stayed up all night working on said paper, my road to a somewhat successful life was so full of potholes that it could no longer be reasonably considered paved. In a moment of anguish, I was feeling trapped by circumstances. And I live in Mississippi, so I was hot, which just made me mad. Hence, the name Winterborn. (Although, at first, it was Wintersong.)
In my imagination, those circumstances became... a witch.
This witch had stolen a fairy and clipped her wings, forcing the fairy to do her bidding and denying her freedom. One second, I'm in the throes of a bona fide conniption, and the next, I'm writing a story in my head. Because I have practical ways of dealing with life's problems, obviously.
I sat down and wrote a paragraph about this story that was playing out in my head. The initial part of writing is the idea itself, getting as many thoughts as I can down on paper or in the computer before I'm distracted. Then I think about how the problem might have started and how it might be fixed. I begin working with other tangents of the story and how these other ideas are connected and add dimension to the story (and because I have a desire to make things more complicated than they have to be). I work on a list of scenes that move the story along. If something isn't working, there is usually a good reason behind it, something that I've overlooked, and it will eventually reveal itself.
Over time, the story evolved, and the fairy's wings weren't literally clipped. I threw a character out the window and put another through therapy, and the story from the character's confinement to freedom occurred differently. In the end, after all of the pieces fit together and made the picture complete, it was as if the idea was always exactly that way from the get go. As if I had imagined it already whole and complete. Without having saved my notes, I wouldn't even remember those first raw beginnings.
During my short term teaching second grade, we had to maintain writing journals, which was great practice, even for me, to come up with short stories on the spot. While I'm not a fan of working on demand, especially creatively, it does have its merits and forces me to grow. Likewise, during my time teaching art, when someone threw a problem at me as if they just expected me to make it happen--such as design a 20-foot-long sign, paint a football on this piece of fabric, or spin this dust bunny into gold--I got out a pencil, drew it on paper, and started measuring. I'd never made a sign in my life, much less one 20-feet-long. They didn't give me the opportunity to say I couldn't do it or to understand that, under no circumstances, would anyone who actually knew me think I was capable of doing such a thing.
My point is, however much I despised these exercises, they did nudge me out of my comfort zone, where I think I can only create if I have Double Bergamot Earl Grey, new paintbrushes, the perfect soundtrack, and what I like to call zee inspiracion! While the results of these exercises will most likely not produce anything worthy of being framed or published (but you never know, right?), they serve to stretch me beyond my own self-imposed limitations. They also get me over the idea that everything thing I do attempt must be worthy of framing or publication. Writing silly short stories that explore the different story elements is actually a great way to practice plot, characterization, the law of three, and many other aspects of storytelling.
If you want to try the exercises, I suggest searching the internet for elementary writing prompts, exercises, and lessons or literary genres and elements. There are so many teaching resources online that teachers share for free. Here's one about how to help a child write a story, and here's Scholastic's Story Starters generator. There is no limit to the elementary writing pins on Pinterest.
These exercises get the imagination going and remind me that I don't always despise creating on demand. There are times that it can actually be fun. Come to think of it, that's how my desire to be a writer was actually born when I wrote my first story.
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