How do I get the idea for my novel?
I finished my second novel, Dead Moon, two weeks ago. My wife is reading it. She hasn’t fired me yet. My first novel, Vile, has spent the last four months with an editor. Goodness knows if it will ever emerge again. So, here I am, starting a new novel again. But where will I find the idea? And how do I know it’s the right idea? And what sort of ideas make the best foundations for your novel?
In this article I’m going to talk about putting together those first ideas that will launch your new novels. Ideas so strong, that at times they’ll feel they are writing it for you.
Three approaches to starting your novel.
- Start from a theme (An overarching idea or concept, eg. Sexual harassment in the workplace.)
- Start from a character (Someone who wants something, eg. A young woman who wants to break the world landspeed record)
- Start from a situation (A problem or a conflict, eg. Trapped on the 32nd floor of a burning skyscraper)
Option 1: The pros and cons of starting from a theme
It’s safe to say I did my first novel the hard way. I did what a lot of people do and started from a theme. A novel’s theme is a pervasive idea or thought that unifies the whole. So, say, you might want to write a novel about the injustice facing refugees travelling to Italy, or the reasons for the Gilet Jaunes protests in Paris.
Those are two great starting points for novels. Sort of. Because they’re also dangerous. You’ve got something to write about, sure, but you’ve got no foundation, no starting point, no thread.
I wanted to critique fantasy novels (in particular those I had loved as a child). I wanted to talk about what it would really be like to have super powered heroes wandering around in a real world, and also about the impact and long-term consequences of combat (which is to say, it isn’t always a “flesh wound”, and that flesh wounds can cripple you for life, and that real life hurts a lot worse than the stories)
Which, frankly, are much worse themes than refugees or the Gilet Jaunes. But I’ve learned a lot since 2014. So, I have a theme I want to write about, what do I do next?
Working from a theme: have fifty ideas.
Get your research hat on and learn everything you can. You put together a folder of articles and clippings, you fill up a note-pad writing ideas, you read whatever books you can find on the subject, and you get as many ideas down as you can.
Once you feel saturated and ready to start, you pick out all your favourite bits and start thinking about them in the story. People crowded on a boat. A drowned child on a beach. A detention centre? How about we steal from the US and have parents separated from their children?[i]
Do you start to see how this can work? From a collage of ideas, the scenes of a story are sprung.
Starting from a theme can lead to a whole world of pain.
The problem with your collage is that it lacks narrative thrust. You might be able to get away with this is you’re a world class poet and wordsmith, but, even then, your story would probably be better off with characters, purpose, conflict and a sense of direction.
Fine, you say, I’ll add those things. Which is good. You should. But the danger of starting with a theme is that your characters become a sticking plaster, a cursory nod to plot, a mouthpiece for the very important things you have to say. This might feel fun for you, but it is boring for most readers. Nobody likes to be preached at.
My first novel since I quit teaching took my four years to finish. This is an insane amount of time to spend on a book that is mostly sword-fights and explosions. But because I wrote from themes, when I got to the end of my first-draft I found paper-thin characters, plot-lines that only made sense if you thought about them as being similar to the power-point in a lecture, and a general lack of direction in the book. If you asked me what it was about a couldn’t answer. That is always a bad sign.
Thus, four years were spend finding characters who matched my themes, giving them compelling desires (that were expressive of my theme), overwhelming obstacles, and a story-line that hopefully made sense. Three years could have been saved if I’d done that to start with. There’s nothing wrong with starting from a theme, but you must do the other work as well.
So, if you’re working from a theme you need to work extra hard to create interesting characters with a powerful narrative drive. The theme should happen around the characters, not the other way around.
Option 2: Start from a character.
Sometimes you have an idea for a character. An idea so strong it wakes you in the morning with your pen in hand and your note book already scrawled with notes (you do have a writers notebook, don’t you.) Great. Let’s write a book for them.
What is a character?
Here’s a couple of ideas that are not characters:
- A kick ass six-foot blonde who fights with a katana.
- A bitter New York cop with a drinking problem.
- A librarian with a secret collection of arcane documents.
They all sound like characters. But they aren’t. A character isn’t a character until they have something they want.
- A katana wielding blonde who wants revenge on those who killed her husband on her wedding day.
- A New York cop who wants to reconcile with his with who has moved to LA.
- An arcanist librarian who wants to train a talented young woman to save the world from the imminent threat of the vampire king.
Why do we care what characters want?
In economics we have something known as a “revealed preference.” Peoples preferences – what they want – are revealed by what they spend, be that money, time, or effort. How people act reveals what they want. Not what they say. How they act.
This is a good thing to remember for dialogue and writing generally: it is very satisfying for an audience or a reader to remark on how a character’s words do not match their actions, IF it consistently reveals some truth about who the character is (possibly some truth about which they themselves are unaware).
But more importantly, a story is about action. About what people do (bearing in mind that inaction can, itself, be a form of action.) So, if how we act is driven by what we want, then the characters must want things in order for there to be action.
Without desire there is no story because there can be no action. Everything a character does must be tied to what they want, their internal world and beliefs and what they are trying to achieve, or it will ring false. And, in turn, characters must be driven by powerful desires if you are to have action enough to achieve a story.
Wanting something is not enough.
Wanting something does not a story make. I want an apple. Oh, look there’s an apple. I eat the apple. This has a beginning, middle, and end, and the protagonist must act to achieve their desire. If my four-year-old came up with this story I would be very happy.
But the essence of character-driven story is a desire which is opposed.
- Our katana wielder wants revenge, but the killer has a whole gang in her way.
- The New York cop’s wife has a good career in LA and he doesn’t want to move (oh, and the building has been taken over by terrorist.)
- The librarian arcanists protegee is talented but all she wants to do is fit in and become a cheerleader.
Yes, somehow my stories turned into Kill Bill, Die Hard and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The character is defined as much by what is stopping them getting what they want as what they want.
External and Internal Obstacles
External obstacles – terrorists in Nakatomi plaza, slayers who want to be cheerleaders, apples that are all the way over there – are the things that keep the story moving
Internal obstacles are what make the story, and the character, interesting. Our New York cop could have just transferred to LA and kept his marriage going, but his pride and sense of identity are threatened both by the move and the feeling he is deferring to his wife. Our librarian struggles with his protegee but also with his desire to protect her, and his growing concern that it is wrong to train teenage girls to kill vampires.
So, you have this picture in your head of a character. But hey aren’t whole until you can answer “what do they want more than anything?” Extra wants are a bonus. They aren’t ready for a story until you can answer “what is getting in there way?”, and, for a really good story, that should be both something external (“ninjas with machine guns!”) and internal (“crippling alcoholism, but they can only fight drunk.). Those last two weren’t from Buffy.
Ask Why
My second post-teaching book started with a character: a pilot who has come out of the forces and wants to get pregnant. That’s a character – she has an identity and a desire, so you can grow from there. Now we need obstacles. Internal: she is by and large asexual and struggles with her gender identity. External: the world is about to end[ii]. There we go. A story.
But this is just the start. The next thing you must ask is why. And this going to be difficult. Why does she want a baby? Why does anybody? Where do her identity issues come from?
I find it best to have some general ideas about this stuff and then, as soon as you have a compelling enough desire and obstacle, start writing. Figure out why as you go along. That’s going to mean re-writing the beginning as you character expands, but some things are best figured out in the doing.
The extent to which you develop your character before starting is a question of personal taste and individual story. But it isn’t enough to say “she wants revenge on the man who killed her husband.” Why may seem obvious, but that’s exactly the moment when you need to think the hardest. Why can’t she just walk away (and make sure she is given the chance and shows why she can’t)? Most people who lose their partners do not pick up a katana and go on a bloodthirsty rampage. Why, why, why?
Getting theme from character
Asking why will lead you to the book’s theme – the overarching idea that holds it all together. Don’t worry about it too much. Let it come to you. But as you work with your character, watch out for links and patterns, start building you collage of ideas that tell you what the book is really about.
A story about a woman with a katana slaughtering those responsible for the death of her husband is cool. The same story that works to comment on patriarchy and possession is cooler.
Once you start seeing the images, weave them back into the characters and situations. Is your katana-weilder fighting the patriarchy? What if the big boss is an ex-lover? Or her father? See how this works?
One character is (usually) not enough.
My first book, which will be out this year if the editor ever finishes, was a theme book. It ended up with a bazillion paper-thin characters. Three years of work turned them all (I hope) into dynamic, interesting characters with their own agendas and conflicts – all of which had to be resolved in the book, all of which illustrated the theme as well as exploring the personalities.
The result was “Vile”, a book that may well end up around 700 pages long. It’s fantasy/science-fantasy so I might get away with it. But ouch. That’s a lot of pages.
The second book, “Dead Moon” was running into trouble at the beginning. You see, it started as a short-story. Woman has three days to get pregnant before the world ends. I was rather entertained by the common myth that a woman can get a man any time she wants, principally because I know so many women from whom that simply isn’t true. No, pig-head, not because they’re ugly. Because people are complicated and meeting new people is hard.
But if my whole story is woman tries to get pregnant and finds it difficult then, well, sixty pages later I’ve finished. Nothing wrong with that but it won’t get you your next novel.
The single greatest determinant of the length of your book, asides from writing bad sentences and a tendency to waffle (guilty), are the number of characters. By characters I mean real characters – people with desires who are attempting to overcome obstacles so they can get what they want. The more you have, the longer and more complex the book.
So, to turn Dead Moon into a novel I needed another character. Now you need to think of somebody who complements and contrasts with your first. Thus, I invented her wingman, who has received a message from the husband he thought killed during the war. He wants to find and resolve his feelings for his lost husband and his experiences in the war, but the messages say his husband is on the south coast of England – hundreds of miles away through war torn territory. Now we have a pregnancy seeking road trip, and two characters trying to understand how war has changed their relationships. Two characters, four times the story.
The result is a book that will be about 250 pages long. Two characters- short book. A zillion characters, and you’re promising HBO you’ll finish the next book before season 5 (d’oh).
Option 3: Start from a Scenario
I think this is how people used to write movies. It’s certainly a lot of fun.
- Terrorists have taken over a skyscraper!
- The vampire king is rising to take over the world!
- Sticking with Joss Whedon – a dozen people are trapped in a bus that will explode if it slows down too much.
There’s a novel Banks wrote mostly because he had an idea about a gigantic spaceship filled with water and a battle taking place around and inside it. Sometimes you have a scene that you just want to write. One way to write a movie or novel is to take a string a escalating action scenes (fist fight – gun fight – one man against a Harrier Jump Jet – EXPLOSIONS!!!), stick an archetype in the middle (grumpy New York cop) and then go. The reader may enjoy the popcorn but will have achieved exactly the same nutritional benefit. So how do you get from scenario to character and thus to story?
Make the Scenario an Obstacle
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with starting from some cool scenes in your head. But the next thing you must do is design a character for whom these scenarios are a perfect obstacle: they externally prevent them from getting what they want, and internally challenge who they are.
John the cop must fight the terrorists not only to rescue the hostages but crucially his estranged wife. But the cherry on top is that he isn’t comfortable with heights. Fighting in a skyscraper gives us lots of opportunities to expose characters to their fears. And as we get to design the characters, we can find whatever is most scary in our scenario and make it particularly awful for them.
For Buffy, confronting the Vampire King means accepting that she is not and can never be the normal girl she wants to be. In order to satisfy her desire to protect others, save the world, and fundamentally to survive (and survival is always a good one), she must give up her desire for a normal life of cheerleading and boys and whatever idea she has constructed of normal.
Do you see how this works? Design your character for the problem. Then go through the process of character deepening we described above and develop from there.
Putting it all together
- Come up with either:
- A general theme or idea you want to write about, like terrorism in modern Europe or how hard it is to be bullied at school.
- A character who wants something that they can’t have for both internal or external obstacle.
- A really cool scene or series of scenes that seem like they would be fun to write.
- If you can’t come up with one of these three, go open a newspaper or magazine and read until something strikes you. The world is full of fucked up shit. Steal it.
- If you’ve started with a theme, build a collage of ideas then try and find a character that fits into that world: a struggling father who is promised money if he helps a jihadist plot, a child with a skin disorder who loves music but can’t find anyone with whom to play. Remember, a character isn’t a character until they have something they want very badly and both internal and external reasons why they can’t have it.
- If you’re starting with a character, or you’ve
derived a character:
- Figure out what they want. All actions come from desire. A story is a series of actions made to achieve a desire.
- Figure out what is externally getting in their way. Draw from the theme of the situations.
- Figure out what is internally getting in their way. Same deal, but don’t rush with this one: people are complicated, and you may be better of figure this one out as they go along. Unless it comes to you in a rush, in which case go with it.
- Add more characters that compliment both theme and character, until you’ve got enough to say what you think you want to say. You can always change them later. If you are writing an intimate character study, or just want a shorter book, have less characters. If you want to explore sweeping themes or sell an 800-page novel, more characters.
- If you’ve started with a scenario, figure out a character for whom that would be a perfect obstacle, build the character(s) as described above, and keeping on going until you get back here.
Now you’re ready to start your novel. Your novel is a sequence of escalating scenarios in which your characters are challenged to achieve what they want. Either they change their internal obstacles and succeed (Buffy accepts she is the Slayer, John learns to respect and trust his wife [sort of, it was the 80s]), or they don’t change and it destroys them.
Most importantly, if you have characters who want things, obstacles in their way, and a general theme that guides what you write, your blank page won’t be blank for long. You’re ready to start writing. Good luck. Have fun.
[i] When did the USA become the evil empire? We’re supposed to be the evil empire, they are supposed to be the idiot cousin, not the other way around!
[ii] For reasons. You’ll have to buy the book to find out 😊 Hopefully it will be out next year, but I’m starting to despair of the whole editorial process…
