No, not the movie 🙂 I’m talking about the beginnings of an idea. The seed of a story. That moment when you realize you may have some ephemeral thing that maybe—just maybe—you can transform into words on a page.
Because once you have your characters, you need a grand adventure for them to go on.
Ideas come and go all the time. When one takes root and I can’t seem to shake it, I know I have the beginning of a plot.
The idea can be simple: “nerdgirl finds out her best friend is an alien who has to leave Earth if they don’t get married” (Gray Card). Or they can be more complex: “waitress who can see the future is hiding from her powers so she doesn’t have to send anyone she loves to their death again, but then has a vision about the guy she’s crushing on and has to send him to his death anyway, but then he comes back and he didn’t die after all and now he thinks he’s going crazy or been drugged by the same people who framed him and got him fired because werewolves aren’t real, and OMG, THAT’S JUST THE FIRST ACT!!!“ (Forbidden Instinct).
The main thing is to be really invested in the idea. If it rises up within you like a guiding star, blinding you to all other light… Yeah, you might want to run with that 🙂 Writing a book takes a lot of time, energy, and work. If the root idea isn’t something that I can dedicate myself to, creating the book will be that much harder.
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