Post #131 July 23, 2018

“Evaluating Story Ideas”

How do I (or any writer for that matter) evaluate story ideas?  Say you’re out mowing the lawn.  An idea comes to you.  Is it a good idea?  Is it worth pursuing?  Or is it some feverish hallucination caused by the rock your mower just slung at your shins?

Here is a systematic way of evaluating story ideas.  It’s pretty much what I do.

1. Does the idea stick with you?   Write down the basics.  Let it alone for a day.  For me, if the idea’s even minimally worthwhile, it won’t go away.  I’ll find myself going back to my memo pad (I write down everything) a lot, jotting down words or phrases that expand on the idea.  Maybe a title will suggest itself, or several titles.  If the idea doesn’t evaporate over several hours and you wind up with a fistful of memo pages, you may be on to something.
2. Has the idea been done before or done to death?  If the idea is one that has been developed to death in a million different permutations, you may want to file this one way.  Unless you’re sure you’ve got a different take on an old idea.  To ensure that your take is truly different, do some market research.  With the Internet and Wikipedia, etc, that kind of research isn’t hard to do now.  Who else has written a story in this vein?  What did they do?  Consider, if you can find the stories, reading your competition to get a feel for what the market has accepted before.  Years ago, I had an idea about a story called “The Time Garden.”  In it, there’s a nursing home and the residents discover that in their gardens out back there’s a time machine.  I could easily imagine what nursing home residents might do with a functioning time machine.  I couldn’t find any other time travel story like this idea (there may be some, I just haven’t found them), so I wrote the story.  I never placed it in print, but today it’s part of a collection called Colliding Galaxies, which has had about 500 downloads from various ebook sites over the last year.  This was one idea that just wouldn’t go away.
3. Can the idea sustain your interest for a long time?  This is related to number one.  After wrestling with the idea, you should have a better notion of whether it’s a short story, a novella or a full-fledged novel.  Even if it’s a short story, it may take a while to flesh the concept out and knock out a first draft.  Maybe a few days.  Maybe a few weeks.  Earlier this summer, I completed a short story called “Cloudchasers.”  It’s circulating around print magazine markets now.  I wrote the thing in a week, but it had been percolating around my mind for over a year.  Plus I spent weeks doing outlines and background research.  When the time came to write, it came out in a torrent…that’s the advantage of letting good ideas simmer for awhile.  But every writer is different.
4. Does the idea have the meat and potatoes to become a real story?  This is all about writerly nuts and bolts.  Is there some kind of memorable character involved, to which memorable things happen?  Is there an obvious flow or arc to the idea…can it be developed and expanded?  Is there a beginning, middle and end, with rising tensions, obvious conflicts, plot twists, etc?  Can you describe the plot in a sentence or two?  If your idea doesn’t have these things or you can’t see them as inherent in the idea, with time and development, file it away for later.  It’s not a story.
5. Does the idea scale?  I borrowed the notion of scaling from the world of tech startups.  They have ideas too.  Jeff Bezos had an idea of building an online bookstore.  He named his company after a big river.  Look at Amazon today.  Does your idea scale into a story…with enough plot complexity and room for character development to make it worthwhile, worthwhile to write and worthwhile for a reader to spend time with?  Can you create something from this idea that will make a reader pause and say, “Ah…I never thought of this before.  I’m glad this isn’t happening to me.  Wonder what I’d do in this situation?”  If your idea can grow enough to take on these responsibilities and requirements, that means it scales well.  Moreover, it means your idea is worth pursuing as a potential story.

 

Every writer evaluates stories a different way, but I’m willing to bet most of them do most of these things most of the time.  A key point: don’t be shy about writing stuff down, even if it’s some late-night musing that doesn’t pass inspection the next day.  Ideas come in all sizes, shapes and colors.  Don’t ever do anything to turn the spigot off.

And be sure to keep reading…a lot.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on July 30.

See you then.

Phil B.