Turning ideas into fiction
After completing my short story a couple of months ago, I managed to write another short fictional piece (750 words) and a short memoir (1,500 words). Between editing my manuscripts, I became overwhelmed with ideas coming down like rain. I felt practically pelted - so to speak.
So, amid rewriting I’ve stopped, grabbed my note pad and started to jot them down furiously. Now I have a couple of dozen ideas ready to be turned into fiction - or do I? Well, it happens that these ideas are, you know, just ideas – I couldn’t turn them into fiction.
I wondered why that is? After analyzing the situation for a while I think I knew the reasons. Here they are:
- 1. The idea doesn’t excite me anymore. The first time it hit me, I was so excited but then it just evaporated – the excitement. I knew this was the reason because my first idea that I wrote had just grabbed me by the throat and refused to let go of me. I just had to write it down. With the story ideas I had now – it doesn’t seem to do that.
2. I find the idea to be too cliché and not believable to me. I need to have an authentic idea to drive me to write it into fiction. As a writer you just know when the idea doesn’t work with your values or beliefs - so that’s when I knew it would fall apart.
3. The idea keeps turning into a memoir and I couldn’t twist the plot no matter how hard I tried. These types of ideas end-up in my memoir file. Unless I am able to fictionalize them they will stay there – inside the memoir bin.
4. The idea is sort of falling short – it isn’t able to carry itself to the end of the story. This means the story is not large enough to carry the plot. Instead the idea can become a subplot. For me, the idea must be complete – have a plot with theme woven into it. The hero and heroine are changed at the end of the story and the change is not due to a coincidence - if I am able to stretch the story idea this far, I know I am onto something.
You see – it’s tough to be a writer – for me at least. Before I did the analysis above, I did try to write the idea into a novel. Of course I was able to move it up to 50 pages, but then that was it – it just died or sagged after the twentieth page.
And don’t forget 50 pages to most writers is nothing but the outline.
