Write a Book: Coming Up with Ideas

Coming up with a premise for your novel is a lot easier than it looks at first glance; I just requires a little bit of creativity.

Have you heard of the ‘list of 100′ method for coming up with ideas? It’s really simple; all you have to do when you’re low on ideas is sit down and write a list of 100 ideas; the idea being that near the end of the list your creativity will be grinding over under the pressure and you’ll get lots of interesting ideas you would have never thought of otherwise. That’s all well and good, but it really is a bit slow; do it if you need to, but if you don’t then I think I’ve found a better way of getting ideas. You see what I’ve noticed is that the best premises tend to take one of three forms; ‘Somebody gains something’, ‘Somebody loses something’, or ‘Somebody wants something’.

Let’s have a look at this in action.

1. A bogie boarder gains the cosmic keystone
2. A pirate loses his ancestral sword
3. A ninja wants to gain a soul

That’s just three simple ideas off the top of my head. Now how do you go about taking those simple ideas and extending them to a full length novel? Simple; you just have to think about the kinds of stories you could tell with them.

Go with the first idea. Now this is an opportunity to show you another technique I’m very fond of, and that is taking names literally. For my very first novel The Wolf’s Will I decided that Wind Surfers were hippies that literally surfed around on the wind, and that’s an idea which I want to carry forward here. The book I’m seeing here is about a world where dance is a magic form and these ‘boogie borders’ literally propel their boards through the air by boogieing. I like this idea; there are a lot of directions I could go with it. I could fill in a whole world with references to various kinds of dance; Wikipedia will be busy.

So we have our group of unlikely heroes who have just had the most powerful object in existence fall into their laps, what is it? In keeping with the theme of dance it’s an exhaustive encyclopaedia about all forms of dance in existence. What are they going to do with it?

That’s the book right there; it’s a bunch of guys trying to keep something extremely powerful out of everyone else’s hands until they can work out what they’re meant to do with it. I think the choice at the end has to be theirs and wrapped up with the themes of personal responsibility to the world.

That’s the first lesson. To recap; come up with a simple premise, and think about the kinds of stories you could tell with it; and then the book will follow.

Until next time.

Matthew