Getting new ideas onto paper

[Aun Doorback]

So you have a good idea for a story whilst travelling to work - It has a rough plot, a main character and you picture the start of it in your head.

At work you look a couple of facts up on the net - Still looks promising.

I'm not one to do much planning, so I just go from page one - Get into the dialogue and hope it takes me somewhere.

Given that a lot of you guys have good solid experience for finishing work, what's your advice? How do you go about developing new stories? What's your style?

We all have own methods and I'm interested to know how my fellow chrons begin their new stories?

 

[Mouse]

I just start writing until something happens. Sometimes I start writing with nothing in my head at all - but that's mostly for short stories.

Who needs plotting, eh?

 

[Hex]

I don't let anything stop me -- not research, not self-belief (lack of), not worries about the plot (unless I have to because everything's ground to a halt). I just write, and once it's written I worry about the details. Because sometimes it is (pretty much) perfect the way you first write it.

(having said that, I am -- right now -- starting a new story and not writing it but faffing around on here instead. bad me)

 

[Fedos]

It's sort of like seeds for me. In the past an idea usually comes to me and I'll write it down on a word processor or what not. Then I'll let it marinate for a while, look at it from tiime to time, let it stew and sometimes names of characters will come and lands and places and I'll write those done too. Then more particulars will spring forth about the kind of world it is, and I'll jot those down too. The same is true for how I usually construct plots for both short stories and longer pieces.

It's important to note that a lot of time when these names and characters and scenarios come to me that I'll either be at work or at school and I'll have to pull out my phone and jot them down on a notepad. It's as if my subconscious speaks to me about these things and I have to jot them down.

Now as I'm learning more and more about how to approach something like an epic fantasy series I'm taking the above and adding research to the equation. Now I have an amalgamation of topics that I'll use as a springboard into research when I begin to write the first installment in my fantasy series.

 

[Warren_Paul]

We all have own methods and I'm interested to know how my fellow chrons begin their new stories?

I mentioned this in another post. I just had a great idea of a mythical historic event pop into my head and I brainstormed a whole world from it. Everything just seemed to fall into place for me. Most of the individual character stories (not plot) I figured out as I wrote.

That is essentially how my book started. I just had this idea pop into my head: "What would a fantasy world be like if this happened in its past". So I wrote that piece of history, it was only 1k words about a big battle that happened between the gods.

I based a whole world and characters around that battle, how it shaped the world, affected the people that lived in it.

then I decided what the future of the world would be because of the battle, giving me a target to put down some concepts of the storyline/plot with. I had to figure out how I got from that event in history to the future event that goes with it. Most of it just came to me as I wrote.

I guess you could say I started with a very, very short story.