Welcome to the latest edition of the “Longhand” column, featuring deeper dives into writing craft topics. This column is a benefit for paid subscribers of Footnotes.
Last week, I was hit with a lightning bold of inspiration. It nearly made the hairs on my arms stand up. The Muse does not always act with such intensity, but it’s not necessarily rare either and I’d been mulling this idea in the back of my mind for half a year, letting it simmer. That it finally began to boil was inevitable.
Ideas can literally come from anywhere. For writers, life is an idea factory and all you need to do is pay attention. A couple of years ago, while in Vermont on vacation, I was driving across a bridge. I peered out over Lake Champlain, not thinking about anything in particular, and boom!, an idea popped into my head.
Who’s to say where it actually came from—would crossing any body of water have given me the same inspiration or was it that water, that bridge, that day? The idea was small, just a tiny seed, no plot, no characters, no theme—nothing but the hint of what it could be.
At the time, I was finishing writing my novel The Monsters We Defy and beginning the process of idea generation for the next stand-alone novel in my contract with my publisher. This brand new shiny idea seemed like the perfect one to follow up the book I had just completed. (The book that was conceived on Lake Champlain comes out in June 2024).
There are so many ways an idea can present itself. I almost never have fully formed characters appear in my mind ready to tell me their story. Usually I get a phrase or question or situation. I can often trace the moment of inspiration back to an event—a movie I watched that kept playing in my head after the credits rolled, or a dream I had, or a song that moved me. Author Elizabeth Gilbert says in her book, Big Magic, “The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”
So once you unearth your own strange jewel, how do you go about honing it and turning it into something beautiful? Now keep in mind, I am a plotter or a story architect as opposed to someone who writes by the seat of their pants or “gardens” and allows their story to grow without an outline. So all of my experiences are through that lens. But even if the thought of outlining gives you hives, pantsers still need to go from idea spark to flame.
My first step is to identify what is exciting about the idea. That spark or jewel resonates with you in some way, which is why it’s burning so brightly in your mind. One such idea for me several years ago was a “what if” question: “What if a girl fell in love with an invisible boy?” That idea was so bright that I wrote two different manuscripts addressing that question in different ways with totally different worlds and characters.
My current process is to brainstorm why the idea made me light up. I’ll use a notebook or a mind mapping application to capture everything I want to explore about a given idea. If I’m not sure of the genre, that usually becomes clear quickly and working this way can also suggest characters or story situations.
Brainstorming often leads to research, which is a backbone of my idea honing process. I found both the characters and plot of The Monsters We Defy during the research. The spark for that book was, “Harlem Renaissance era fantasy heist.” That’s all I knew. It was easy to identify what excited me about the idea, basically everything that phrase suggests.