Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

As an author, people often ask me where I get the ideas for my stories. Usually, what they're really wanting to know is how do you go from a cool concept to a fully fleshed-out story. An awesome 'gee whiz' idea can only take you so far, and the key to making it work has more to do with depth and character than it does with the initial idea.

Getting Started--How to Generate Ideas

The method I use for generating ideas often depends on the specific book or story that I'm working on. One of my favorite methods is covered in depth on one of my favorite podcasts, Writing Excuses, and it focuses on the formula: familiar + familiar = strange. Basically, this is how you can be inspired by the creative works that you love, while still creating something original. Let's say you love Harry Potter, and you'd like to write something with a similar feel. That's great. Pick one element of Harry Potter that you'd like to focus on re-creating in your work. Let's choose an obvious one: kids with magical abilities. Now, choose another familiar element to add to the first one. Let's say you'd like your story to take place on an isolated island, kind of a Swiss Family Robinson type of thing. So, now we have kids with magical abilities who are stranded on a desert island. That's pretty good, but why don't we add at least one more element to the mix? Let's take something else familiar, like ghosts. Maybe the island is populated by the ghosts of all of the creatures who've died there. As you can see, we’ve taken three elements that have been used in a lot of different stories and combined them into something that is more unique.

Adding Character and Depth
As I've mentioned, the concept is not the same as the story. One way to bring our disparate ideas together into a story is to add in a character. Since we’re talking about middle grade, our story will probably focus on one main point-of-view character. When choosing this person, ask yourself who will be in the most pain, have the most difficult struggle and/or have the most agency within the world you’ve created?

In order to know that, we need to add more depth to our story elements by asking questions to build on our world. For example, what magic system are the students using? What is the basis of their power? If their magic is generated by pairing up with another person and harnessing their combined energy, then perhaps our main character is forced to pair with her arch enemy (which introduces ample opportunities to explore her emotional plot). If we choose that route, then we’re clearly setting ourselves up for a friendship story where the two enemies find a way to come together and tackle the ghost problem in the end.

On the other hand, what if the basis of their magic is something entirely different, say, they use their memories as fuel, so they have to be willing to forget their past in order to be powerful in the present. Perhaps the main character just lost someone she loves and is afraid to burn those memories, thus introducing an entirely different character arc.

As you can see, fleshing out your ideas has a huge impact on your story. There are so many things we don’t know: 'Why are all of the ghosts centered on this one island?,’ ‘Was it a coincidence that the students shipwrecked there?,' 'If animal ghosts have appeared on this one island, is it possible that they might appear elsewhere in the future?,’ etc. Don't sell your story short by stopping when you get your first neat idea and not delving any deeper. You may end up chucking many of your initial ideas for ones that come later, and, even when you do settle on an idea, you still need to unravel as many layers as you can to make it engaging for readers.

Start Writing

Now it's your turn. Try the exercise outlined above to generate your own story idea. Once you have the basics, ask yourself what character will be affected most by the world I've created. Flesh out your idea by asking as many what, how and why questions as you can. Remember, it's not so much the cool concept that keeps people reading, it's how your characters are hurt by and respond to the world that you have created.

Changing the World a Paragraph at a Time

As I’m writing this, I can hear breaking news being televised in the next room, reporting that police officers in Baton Rouge have been shot and killed. After I first heard about this and had a chance to process my now all-too-familiar shock and disgust, it occurred to me that our country has reached the point when the mourning periods during which we lower the American flag to half staff are now overlapping, due to the frequency of such tragedies. These events of extraordinary violence have become so familiar we use the names of their locations as shorthand: Orlando. Baton Rouge. Minneapolis. Dallas. San Bernardino. Charleston. Newtown. All of this is to say nothing of the wider problems also occurring throughout the world.

When I was a kid in the age range of the middle grade reader, our most immediate access to the events of the day was either the evening news, the newspaper that arrived the following morning, or occasional thirty-second bulletins on the radio. Social media and a twenty-four hour news cycle defined by divisiveness, hatred, and fear has to make it harder for kids these days. Even if they don’t closely follow what’s happening, they live in a world saturated by all variety of things going wrong. As they get older, they become more aware of the boundaries that separate people as lines are drawn between ideologies that don’t agree. Talking about things like politics and religion have become conversational third rails, since expressing beliefs or aligning yourself with any kind of strong opinion too readily invites conflict.

When thinking about problems like these, it’s hard for me to separate my roles as a teacher and a writer, because, for better or worse, I see them both as much as who I am as what I do. Teachers can have a great deal of influence on their students. They plant seeds regarding character. They try to act as role models worth emulating. When the school year is done they send their students into the future and usually will never know how much difference they made, if any at all. It’s frustrating, but it’s something you learn to accept. In the end, all you can do is hope you made a difference.

One way teachers work to make that difference is through books. They put a lot of thought into what they read to their classes, and what titles are included in their classroom libraries. They’ve all seen students unable to choose a new book to read, and usually can figure out which books those perplexed students will enjoy. They help desperate parents of reluctant readers find books their children might connect with.

This is where writers come in. We need to give those kids books to read, and ideas to think about. We make our characters handle difficult situations and resolve the conflicts that follow. Some of those conflicts are things middle grade readers might experience in their daily lives, or are only aware of from a third-person distance. Some might even be so utterly fantastical they could never happen in real life, but they can still give readers things to consider. 

We also give them examples of consequences that follow certain decisions and actions. I think it’s fair to say that most writers have favorite books from when we were younger. How many of those books might have helped shape our view of the world as adults? 
Even a book intended to be little more than a fun story has merit. Maybe silly is exactly the kind of thing that will win over a reluctant reader, and convince them to broaden their horizons and try reading something new. Maybe it just provides that reader with a welcome escape from what they’re facing in the real world.

Not every book that makes it on a library shelf is going to change the trajectory of the entire human race, but that doesn’t mean it won’t challenge some reader out there. Even when we’re frustrated enough to scream from all of the work that comes with our drafting, and revising, and editing, and revising again, everything we do is a small step in the direction of someday making a difference. When we write, our goal is to communicate an idea or provoke an emotion at some level. Isn’t that ultimately the purpose of art?

It’s easy to feel helpless when things in the world are going so wrong, and so many problems feel like they’re beyond our control. The next time you sit down to outline, or stress-spiral through your notes, or hack away at your current work-in-progress, remember that each paragraph you write is a contribution to the greater cultural thumbprint of literature. Writing something can make a difference, whether it ends up on bestseller lists, or is only enjoyed by a small circle of people, or just helps you understand your own world better. You probably won’t ever get to know what kind of reach your work has or how many people could be influenced by it, but that’s okay.

Regardless of where you are on your own writing journey, there will always be value in the effort. Your effort could someday plant an idea with someone, and help them find the tools they need to make their world a better place.

Careful: Inspiration is sneaking up on you!

Fellow Middle Grade Minded Blogger Jamie Krakover recently wrote a wonderful post on inspiration and how asking "What if?" can be an amazing catalyst for our imagination.

That got me to thinking - How do I get inspired? Where are my ideas coming from?

For me, the process seems to take three routes: the esoteric, the stumble-upon-it, and the story I need to tell.

The Esoteric

These are the ideas that are completely random. In my mind's eye they are swirling all around and seem to light on me like a butterfly.

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In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert argues that ideas are a "disembodied, energetic life-form", forever searching for someone to bring them to fruition (in whatever creative field you are engaged in, from knitting to writing to painting to gardening to whatever).

While this may sound crackers to you, there have been many occasions when an idea has simply "appeared", often almost fully-formed, begging for me to write it. Sometimes the result is good, sometimes not-so-good. In all cases, the not-so-good stories were because my heart wasn't quite in it. I still need to learn when to abandon an idea that doesn't quite do it.

Still the book I just finished (and am too superstitious to discuss yet!) arrived one afternoon without fanfare, but with great persistence. It followed me on my walks, it niggled at me in the shower, it directed me to a certain book, which when I opened it, led me to my character. And then it had the good grace to help me write it, including providing me with the elusive voice on page one. Sure, it needed revising and editing and all that good stuff, but I can only describe it as a gift. And truthfully, I felt more like the scribe, getting it all down, something I had never really experienced before.

The Stumble-Upon-It

I love the stumble-upon-it inspirations. These are the ideas that are gracious enough to present themselves in such a way that they are completely intriguing.

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One amazing source of ideas is old newspapers (and I'm talking really old here). Last year I was looking for the obituary of my great-uncle, who died tragically in the early part of the twentieth century, when a story about a presumed murder caught my eye. (The murder was presumed because there was not yet a body). Suddenly I found myself going to the next day's paper on the microfiche, then the next. Each day's content was more fantastical than the last. The old adage that you wouldn't believe something could happen if you read it in a book was true in this case.

It also happened that the reporter could spin a yarn. In fact, it's my experience that old newspaper reporters wrote their stories in the most florid and excitable tone, a tone just begging to be fictionalized. While I have yet to write the book, it continues to percolate in the back of my head.

Another idea I am currently exploring presented itself to me via Twitter. There are a few random historical and news sites I follow on twitter and when one of them popped up with a plaque from an historical site in England awhile back, I knew it was the name of one of my next novels. Since then, I've been researching and putting together an outline. This made me feel very cocky about my use of Twitter and has obliterated the guilt I sometimes associate with it, since it can be my way of avoiding real work...

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The Story I Need to Tell

It's a Mystery, Pig Face! definitely falls into this category.

I'd always wanted to write a fun adventure story in the vein of Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome, Harriet the Spy and that ilk.

I also always wanted to write about the neighbourhood I grew up in. Like kids everywhere, we were always hoping to stumble upon a mystery. If we couldn't find one, we were more than happy to make one up. This didn't always end well. Thus Tracy and Ralph and Pig Face's adventures were born.

Two years ago I wrote the first draft of another MG novel during NaNoWriMo about a boy coping with a family loss and a discovered grave. I haven't returned to that book yet, and I suspect when I do it will be almost completely overhauled, but I needed to write it at the time because it was a family story that had been worming its way into my imagination for many years.

So that's my take on inspiration and ideas. If I could sum it up in two words it would be: PAY ATTENTION! Inspiration is always sneaking up on you. You don't want to miss it.



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Now I'd love to hear your take on ideas and inspiration - do share!

Writer Process Blog Tour

One of my Middle-Grade Minded Blog buddies, Tom Mulroy, invited me be part of the Writing Process Blog Tour. If you aren’t familiar with this super-cool tour, it involves different writers responding to questions about their writing process, then passing the same question on to other writers, and so on. Writing and talking about writing are two of my favorite things to do so I jumped on board… or blog… hmmm.

And here are the questions Tom handed off to me, with my answers.

What are you working on?
What’s getting the most attention right now is a story I previously wrote as a YA and am changing to MG. It’s about a girl named Robin who has perfected the act of being someone she isn’t.  When one of her best friends from elementary school, Dani, is selected as the new target for her “friends” to pick on and tear down, Robin figures out a way to help her old friend best her current friends by preparing Dani for what they'll say, what they'll do and how to beat them to the punch. What started as a one-time project rapidly multiplies with requests from girls that want her to help them, too. When Robin’s popular-or-die friends hear the buzz about the Robin Hood Club and her clients, especially Dani, push Robin to choose one side or the other, Robin is forced to confront warring loyalties and decide for herself who she really is.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?
Most of my stories are based on at least a thread of something that happened to me.  I have never written a novel without including some of my real-life experiences.  My characters are typically girls who clumsily trip through life, bouncing from mistake to mistake, to figure out who they really are and what they stand for.

Why do you write what you do?
I’ve been a teacher of students ranging in age from 7 – 18. Watching them struggle with every day problems and much bigger, life-altering problems, fuels me to help people find their own gifts and strengths and purpose… and that what you’ve survived is never an excuse for giving up on yourself.  

Also, someone once told me that writing was just a hobby and I’ve spend every day since then proving that person wrong.  

How does your writing process work?
You’re probably going to want to skip over this because… my process? It’s a P-R-O-C-E-S-S! And I’m pretty sure I’m the only who gets excited talking about it.  But if you’re game, it goes something like this:

• Cool idea gets me excited about a new story.
• Title. I have to have some sort of working title before I can move on.  I will seriously not write a single word until I have this.
• Character names! I love and hate this process, but the names – like the title – have to fit my characters.
• Story development (the REAL work).

• I break the story in the quarters. In each quarter, I write some things that will happen and the turning point that leads to the next quarter. This involves chart paper, markers, and sticky notes, so I am very, very happy during this process. 
• I then break down each quarter into chapters and write a quick description of each chapter.
• Then… yes there’s more… then I break it down into scenes. 
• At that point, I generally create a rough synopsis and then…. THEN I BEGIN WRITING!
• I have some great critique partners that are also some of my best friends and they keep me (and my story) in line.  So, I give them a chance to make it better.
• I write a really clean first draft, so my revisions are almost 100% story-related (characters who don’t make sense or who show up out of no where and why is there a pelican on your porch in Denver?)
• I revisit the synopsis and make it more detailed and accurate.
• From there, it goes to my agent, who then reminds me I’m nothing without her and makes the story even better!

The most frequently asked question I get is how long it takes me to write a book. When I finally quit coloring and spreading colorful sticky-notes on chart after chart, I write quickly.  All three of my published novels have been written and edited and ready for submission in less than 2 months.

The next most frequently asked question (by MG readers) is how it feels to be famous.  Is it rude to laugh when people ask me that? I’m pretty sure it’s rude.  But I’m even surer that the truth about how “unfamous” I really am will only quell their memory of meeting a “real author.”

If you have some fun answers that I could use instead of rude, obnoxious laughter, please, please, please leave a comment below and I’ll enter you into a drawing for my July MG release with Aladdin, The XYZs of Being Wicked.

The Merging of the Real World With Your Fantasy World

I was having lunch with a co-worker of mine the other day and we got into an entire conversation about Garbage Juice.

Yes, that's right. Garbage Juice.

For those of you who don't know what garbage juice is, it's that delicious secretion that seeps out of garbage bags and always magically seems to get on your hands and clothing no matter how hard you try to avoid it. The smell, is rancid. The texture is that of rotten milk (typically....). Oof. Just the thought of seeing garbage juice makes me want to hurl.

Yet, I experienced garbage juice all the time during my teenage years when I worked in the mall. And my vivid memories of garbage juice made me realize I had to put it into my writings of COPERNICUS NERDICUS.

Don't worry, garbage juice wasn't the only thing I threw into that book.

This is a picture of the mall I used to work in when I was a kid. One of two malls where I was an employee at ELECTRONICS BOUTIQUE. A video game store back in the day that was bought out by GAMESTOP. Anyway, a huge portion of my book takes place in the confines of a mall. Luckily for me, I know how a mall works, inside and out.

There are countless scenes from COPERNICUS NERDICUS that I've taken from real life. Getting locked in a mall, crawling into a garbage compactor (yes I had to because I dropped the store keys in there), racing down the hallways behind the food court, and getting lost in the shipping depot where the trucks dropped off deliveries. All because I worked in the mall.

The funny thing is, I don't even walk into a mall now without seeing giant robots destroying it. And I love it lol.

Do you know what it comes down to though? Real life is your best bit of research for letting your book shine and in fact even making it more believable. I'm not saying that you can do everything that you write about in your book, but it's important to make sure that you research as much as you can.

The current novel I'm writing is about Easter Island. Now I have a lot of revisions to make based on all the research I'm doing, and hell now I even want to go to Easter Island. I'm even interviewing people who have been there just to make sure I'm getting all the nitty gritty down tight.

I guess the real message of this quick post, is that you really need to dig deep into everything you've done in your life and throw that into your books whenever you can. Your imagination is a strong weapon, but sometimes things that have happened in your real life, can make your book even stronger.

Even if that means putting your hands into some garbage juice.

Write What You Know

I’ve always hated this advice. I remember the scene(s) in Gossip Girl where Dan Humphrey is all sad because he’s told to stop writing the same stories over and over again. Why is he sad? Because that’s all he knows! *whines*

Holy cow do I want to scream at Dan. Even more, I want to scream at the professional author who tells him to live more so he’ll have more stories to tell.

Guys, fiction is fiction. If you ONLY wrote about things you’ve personally done, well it wouldn’t be fiction anymore. You’d be putting fake names on a memoir. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. If you want to write about things you’ve done—do it! What’s wrong is when we sit here and think that’s the ONLY thing we can write. 

I’m a big fan of stepping out my box and telling others to do the same.

A part of me wants to shout out “Screw the ‘Write What You Know’ Rule!” But the truth is, there is some merit to it. You just have to look at it right.

So here’s my take on it.

If you look at this writing “rule” in a big picture way, you’ll get all kinds of messed up and turn into Dan Humphry #2 (don’t become Dan Humphrey #2). Where Write What You Know comes in, is the details.

Now I’m not part goblin, I don’t live in a futuristic society and I’ve never been lost in underground tunnels. But I wrote a book about those things. Clearly, I didn’t write only things I’ve experienced. But I can still use things I do know to make my writing more realistic, more relatable and make it jump off the page.

When I was in Middle School I went caving while at summer camp (I’m actually itching to go again sometime soon). It was fantastic! I saw firsthand what it was like to explore the underground (even if I was being led by a professional caver who knew the caves inside and out). I remember what it was like to have to wait a full 5 minutes for your eyes to adjust. I remember the sounds of the echoing, the water dripping from the high ceiling to who knows where. I remember the bats hanging on the walls.

I used all those experiences in my writing.

Did I need them to write what I did? No. But did they make those underground scenes better? YES!

Joan D. Vinge

This is something you can use in your writing every single day. It doesn’t have to be anything extravagant. Remember a time that you did something similar to your character and use it.  It can be as simple at staring at a scratch on the kitchen counter while your parents argued, or the feeling you got when you first met your best friend. Settings, feelings—details. The little things. Those are the things that make every scene jump off the page. Use things you’ve seen, you’ve felt, you’ve wanted or hated, smelled, touched. You don’t have to have been where your character is going, but you probably have some way to bring your own experiences into the writing.

Want some homework? Think of one scene you’ve written. Got it? Now think of one aspect you’ve experienced yourself within that scene. It can be a feeling, setting, even just one object you remember well. Use the things you remember seeing and feeling and add it to your scene.

Did it make it better? Does your scene feel more real? I’d be surprised if it didn’t (but you can tell me either way)

Reality Can Be Better Than Fiction

Sounds odd coming from a fiction writer, on a blog for fiction MG writers, right? But let me explain. I love fictions stories. But sometimes, the real world is even cooler than the things we can make up in our own heads. So why not use them?

We’re writing for 9-13 year olds and if there is one thing I know about that age is that they love to learn. Well, less that they like to learn, but more that they like to know things. Teachers and school? Bahaha. No. But being able to tell someone about the ice caves in Alaska? or the cliff mountains in China? Or the pink lake in Australia? Yes! 

So use the information around you (I’m a big google fan) to your advantage and pull in your readers in a way you never have before. Teach them something. Entertain them but show them how amazing the real world can really be. 

Topic One: settings. 

This is one of my favorite ways to take an average story and make it extraordinary. Because you can place nearly any story into a new setting to take it up a notch, or ten. 

Making a story stand out can sometimes be more difficult than we’d like. The story pulling at your heart strings might be a story that’s been done too many times. A story that you’re afraid won’t stand out enough in the slush pile or even on the shelves. Do you put it down and try something else? Maybe. But I’m a fan of following my heart. I think you should to.

So here’s plan B. Open up your browser, or walk into the book store, and start a little research. Maybe that quest your character must go on will take him to the pink lake in Africa (there’s also one in Australia) instead of a forest on the outskirts of town.  

Or maybe instead of growing up in a small town in the united states she grew up in the city in Bonn  germany where the tree’s form a roof over the town in the spring time.

Or instead of getting lost in the mountains, your character gets lost inside the selenite crystals of the Naici mines in Mexico.

Kids don’t want to feel like they’re being taught something, they want to experience something. Reading is the perfect way to do that. Give them the kind of adventure they won’t ever forget. The kind that could inspire curiosity for the world’s great places.

http://www.boredpanda.com/amazing-places/