What are you doing if you have an idea but no plot? I often get awesome ideas. But I can’t mostly write them because I have no plot ideas. Can you give me any tips?
Write it down. You might not have a plot right now, but you could get one in a few days, or a few months. Always keep a list of all your ideas for later use. Even if it doesn't turn into a story, it could be used in another story.
I agree with the above! Plot is something you have to build over time. (It does not have to take this long) but it took me many months to turn my ideas into a solid plot. much thinking,planning, brainstorming and day dreaming. It will come!
Plot develops over time as others have said. It took two years for a plot of mine to come together after having the initial idea. I just worked on other things until then. I did some writing everyday just to stop myself getting rusty. You have to be patient. Read. Watch movies. Do research. And above all live. Life gives good ideas.
Creating the world, the plot, and the characters are my favorite parts of the process. That's when my imagination can run wild and I'm not having to worry about prose, or pacing, or info dumping. I can just...dream. That's a big reason why I'm an outliner—I simply enjoy creating notes and outlines.
Just write your first things that comes to your mind. Do the research you need, maybe that will give you a clue that is missing on your story.
I think about. If it is worth writing down, then I do write it down. Some time gives some distance. Distance helps to notice if it really is good idea or boring or bad idea in a disguise. About 99% of good ideas are bad. They just look good because of too short distance, lousy light and hormones. Good ideas lure special kind of characters around them. And characters have problems and needs and difficulties and conflicts... and then there is a seed of plot....
I was going to respond, then I realised I haven't a clue what you mean by 'idea.' Can you give us a few examples? I often start with characters, who have nothing to do until I give them something to do—and that develops into a plot. But I do get an idea what these characters are like before I start working on a plot. Is that what you meant? Kinda...?
For my first published novel, I had an idea. Boiled down, what would happen if a fire-breathing dragon encountered a WWII era aircraft? I thought it was a neat idea. So I created a world where that encounter could take place. Then I devised a plot, and created the characters to tell the story. If you have an idea, maybe do something the same. Maybe you switch up and come up with the idea, and then the characters, followed by the plot.
I'm not her, but maybe idea in this context means something like theme? Like "I want to write about this thing that really concerns me" but there's no plot to make that happen?
Yeah, maybe that's it. Hmm.... That's where the storytelling brain needs to kick in. How do I deal with this issue? Who else deals with it? What do they do? Who doesn't like what they do? Does somebody like what they do? What matters about this thing that concerns me? Where does this thing that concerns me usually happen? And when? Start pushing ideas together, and that's when a story emerges. Some people do it the other way around. They start with characters, a situation, move the characters around, give them personalities and things to do ...and the theme emerges. Lots of ways to get there, but a writer needs to develop storytelling muscles. It's not enough to just have ideas. That's okay if you don't plan to become a writer. But if you do want to be a writer, you need to force your ideas to coalesce into a story. That takes conscious effort. Then the story has to get written. I've just been re-reading an old 'how-to' book on fiction writing (containing articles by many different published authors.) Some of what it talks about is way out of date, but a lot of it isn't. One chapter deals with 'ideas.' The writer said he's always getting ideas ...sometimes they're just a snippet of conversation. Or a picture in his mind of an autumn day in a certain city. Or a sudden wish to buy a pedigreed dog. Or the return of somebody he never wanted to see again. Or a particular character comes to mind. As soon as these unconnected ideas come to him, he writes each one on a separate scrap of paper, then stashes them in a box he calls his 'ideas folder.' When he gets stuck for a storyline, he goes to the box, grabs a fistful of these papers and spreads them out on the table. He then chooses four or five of the 'ideas', puts the rest back, and constructs a plot using those four or five ideas combined. This isn't the way I work personally, but I can see it has merit. Maybe the OP should start an ideas box? Sounds intriguing.
JUST START WRITING! Be prepared to throw it out if it doesn't work. But, even if you know only that it doesn't work, you've narrowed things down. It's just words. Don't over-think this shit.
I have all my ideas on a document and I'll go over them and either add more ideas or see ways to connect them to each other. The latter is what - for me - makes way for the plot to show itself. It's also good to ask "why would this happen? What's going on for this to be a thing?"
I never have a plot first, always just some random snippet of an idea. How much responsibility did the cooks for the staff dining hall at Auschwitz bear? What if the little girl I knew who committed suicide had done it before? My rage at this Turkish man who was trying to paw my wife one night in a bar. What if the Earth had a greater hive consciousness that we were part of, but unaware of? Take the idea, turn it about, look for the shiny bits. What needs polishing further? What needs to be cut off? Are there characters hinted at in the idea, or do you need to add some? Where is it set, and in what? It'll come, slowly or not, and you might realize that no, the whole thing is a dead end and just pitch it. I find taking long walks in the morning, no headphones, just the sounds of the river and the city slowly waking up gives my mind space to think and noodle these things out. I also make a point of carrying a notebook (well, my phone these days) when I'm out drinking so that I can jot down those "genius" ideas that I have after a beer or sixteen. Some of them are actually okay, and some may end up in an indictment, but it's better to have some sloppy suggestions of what you were thinking about at an inconvenient time than just the vague memory of having had a thought.
Oh thank God that's not just me. 3am. Googling super organisms and various forms of collective behaviour.
I have a couple of stories that have died on the vine because, while I had a great premise (IMO, of course), I couldn't come up with the meat of the story. I have three chapters of a very promising book about a guy buying a dilapidated house to fix up after spontaneously quitting his highly successful job in the pharmaceutical industry, only to find that his new house just may be haunted. My plan was to have the haunting be faked to chase him out of the house, but I could just never get a handle on the who and why of the perpetrator. The scheme would have been the backdrop of the romance between him and his sexy fireman neighbor, and the driver of a lot of events in the story, so my inability to flesh it out caused the whole thing to wither away. I still hope I'll come up with something to be able to continue it one day, but so for the muse has been quite uncooperative.
You could always do the whole hidden treasure and someone who feels like it should be theirs fake haunts the house bit.
I thought of that one, but could never figure out a good reason why the perp couldn't have just gone into the house and taken it before my MC moves in. It's a crappy house in a transitional neighborhood that was sold after the elderly owner with no heirs passed away. The house has been vacant for several weeks before my MC shows up.
Was it you or somebody else on Twitter I spoke to who had a m/m romance going where a tree falls on a guy's house and the sexy neighbour comes to help fix it? Anyway, when you said the new house might be haunted, I actually thought maybe he falls in love with a ghost... I may have to write about a ghost love story now... To be honest it could be that whoever it was trying to scare the guy away wanted the house for himself - maybe it was his childhood home before they were forced to move because his mum couldn't afford the mortgage anymore, and ever since then he's dreamt of going back, only the elderly person who did own it now refused to sell. Maybe your MC who moves in inherits it as opposed to buys it. Or your MC could buy it before the person who wanted it could save up enough - maybe he was on the verge of having enough, confident no one's ever gonna want the project of doing it up - then your MC comes along.
Nope, not me, but it certainly sounds like something I'd write! I think the real issue is that I absolutely suck at two things that would be essential to pull the story off - reverse engineering a mystery, and creating a great villain.
The villain was in prison. The Villain was giving birth. The villain is a child. The villains mother was giving birth to them in prison.
Happy to help if you wanna bounce ideas. Can't help with mystery as I suck at plotting but villains I can do I think My antagonist is probably one of my best characters in my WIP and the most nuanced.
