How to Develop a story idea section 1

Fake it until you make it: I never understood this statement. It always seemed a little counterproductive to me. But one thing I've learned over the years is to try to see things from a different perspective than my usual one. So that's what I'm doing with this little gem.

What does "Fake it until you make it" mean to me?

Well, it means showing up every day to do the work for one thing. No excuses. No, but my muse isn't talking to me. No, but the words just won't come. I've been there and done that for several years, languishing and annoyed with the fact that the words. Still. Would not. Come.

Fake it until you make it can also mean, do the work until you find your confidence. Usually, it's there all along, just hiding way down deep. You know, so deep you can't see it, and it might as well be non-existent. (No really, it's there, I swear.)

Part of my year of doing is showing up to do the work, even when I get in my way, and the words just aren't there. It's hard. Real hard. But if it were easy, more people would do it, right?

Because of this, I've decided to share my entire writing process here. How I get my ideas, what I do with them, but most importantly, how I'm going to decide if my current thought will make a novel. Yes, you can do that. You can test your ideas to make sure that they will carry you through to your end goal, a rough draft. That doesn't mean that this "test" will tell you if you've got a good idea, it just helps you flush that concept out so that you hopefully avoid writing yourself into a corner, or worse... write several thousand words to realize you don't have a novel.

I wish I could say that I discovered this trick to testing out novel ideas, but I didn't. It came to me in the form of another writers tutorial. If you'd like a copy of the text that I use, I'd be happy to send it to you, and a copy of her plotting course which I received for members of my rl writing group. Just message me, let me know you read this, and of course, supply your email, and I'd be happy to pass it along.

Now, the good stuff.

Part one of how to develop and test a story idea is Character:

You're to free write a vague list of possible characters until you find one that speaks to you on some level. This is my list it doesn't have to be long:

Woman has magically neutered herself
Man's love interest curses him in an attempt to save her own life
Man must make amends to the descendant of a woman he crossed
Woman dies and must ferry the dead to keep out of hell

For the purposes of this exercise, I'll be using woman has magically neutered herself. Now that I have my base character, I'll be freewriting basics about this person like age, name, occupation. If you prefer to use character sheets that's fine too. Typically before I freewrite, I look for a photo that I feel like could represent what I think this person might look like. I'll be posting the results of that in my next post, and maybe the photo as well before I move onto the next step.

As always, I hope this helps some of you and happy writing.

-Corbyn