Writers in the Storm

by Alicia Ellis

Have you ever had that spark of an idea that made you itch to sit down and create? Where does that come from, and can you get it on demand? This post is an actionable guide for obtaining your spark and fanning it into an amazing and useable story idea.

For me, ideas stem from curiosity. When I see something interesting, I ask, “What if?”

You must create opportunities to ask that question. Don’t wait for them to hit you in the shower.

Know Yourself

It’s important to know what gives you that initial spark of interest to dive into creating a new story. You might already know what sparks you, or maybe you don’t. Is it the protagonist? The setting? The conflict? The technology? The magic system? The theme? A combination of these or others?

If you’re not sure, think of your favorite stories and describe them in a sentence or two. Don’t craft a pitch. Rather, I’m asking you to do this off the top of your head. If you’re telling a friend how much you love a book or movie or TV show, and they ask what it’s about, what’s the first thing about the story that you describe?

For instance, let’s use Twilight as an example because most people at least know what it’s about. You don’t have to love Twilight for this exercise to work, so just go with me either way. How would you describe this movie/book?

Is it about the conflicts in a relationship between a human girl and a vampire boy? If you think so, then I’m guessing it’s a great relationship that gets your wheels moving. There are all kinds of relationships: friendships, siblings, parent-child. Not all relationships are romances, even though the primary one in Twilight is.

Is it about a girl stuck in a love triangle between a vampire and a werewolf who are sworn enemies? Maybe it’s the internal conflict you love—the complexities inside us that can make a character intriguing.

Is it about human-drinking vampires who obsess over a girl protected by human-friendly vampires? Maybe you’re more drawn to an external conflict.

Is it about vampires blending in with humans in a town that gets hardly any sun, where the vampires can hide it in plain sight? Maybe you love a great setting that establishes the tone for a story.

It’s about a girl who falls in love with a sparkly vampire who doesn’t die in the sun. You may be drawn to a magical or science-fiction idea. (This is me, by the way.)

Break out a few of your favorite stories (and a few you don’t like) and describe each one in a sentence or two. You might learn something about what gets you excited about a story.

Go Find Your Spark

Don’t wait for inspiration to strike you in the shower. Go out and actively grab it.

You don’t have to literally go anywhere to do this. You can subscribe to content that might inspire you, turn on the television to watch a show or a movie, read a book, or watch the people around you. I get inspired by a new magical or science-fiction concept.

To stay inspired, I follow a number of content-providers, like NASA, who provide what I need, and I often leave the television on the Science Channel in the background.

Where is your inspiration? Go get it.

Be Curious

Ask “What if?”

When you encounter something that makes you lean in and pay attention, roll with it. Question what’s behind it. And have fun with it. You’re a storyteller, after all.

If you get that spark from a great relationship, focus in on the ones around you, the ones you see on TV and in movies, and the ones that come across your Facebook feed. If you see an interesting relationship, ask yourself what’s happening when they’re in private or when they’re away from each other. Are they really what they appear to be? What are they hiding? What are their insecurities? What brought them to this moment? Make it up. Make it outrageous.

If internal conflict drives you, ask yourself what people are thinking. Imagine that a minor character in a story you’re consuming has a conflict of his own. What brought him into this scene, and why is he upset about being there?

If you’re ever disappointed with the ending of a story, or if you predicted wrongly about how it would end, ask what you would have done differently. How would your way have changed other parts of the story as well?

Here’s a personal example: My new release, Girl of Flesh and Metal, features a teenage girl with an artificially intelligent cybernetic arm, … and the arm may or may not be causing her to kill people in her sleep. (You’ll notice from this description that my focus is on the big tech thing rather than on, say, character or internal conflict or relationships. There’s obviously more going on the book itself, but my description demonstrates what sparks me.)

I read books that have big tech ideas in them. Before I started growing this book in my head, I read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. It’s basically a collection of connected stories that center around artificial intelligence and around three laws that all artificial intelligence must follow. The laws are meant to ensure that robots protect and obey human beings, and the stories are about how robots interpret those three laws in strange and dangerous ways.

You know how, when you read a great book, it stays with you? It sits in your brain, emerging to the surface when something reminds you of it. I, Robot did that.

Months later, I was watching an online video about robotic prosthetics (because I subscribe to science-y content to ensure I encounter things that give me the spark).

While watching the video, I thought, “What if?” What if the robot prosthetic does something other than intended? What if it’s unpredictable? What if it breaks Asimov’s three laws or interprets them in an unexpected way?

That was the first seed of my story. And all I did to get there was read a book, find a video in my Facebook feed, and ask a few questions. It wasn’t luck; I set myself to be inspired by knowing myself, subscribing to the right content, and being curious.

Make It Hurt

What’s a story without conflict?

You know what inspires you. You were curious. You asked questions. Now, you have your story seed—that thing that excites you.

This is the fun part: someone has to suffer.

Because we want to create conflict, the next step for me is to decide: Who would this hurt the most? For Girl of Flesh and Metal, that led me to create my protagonist, a teenage girl who detests artificial intelligence despite the fact (or maybe because of the fact) that her parents own the biggest technology company in the country. She didn't choose to have the cybernetic arm; her parents installed it while she was in a coma.

For me, the high-tech idea comes first and gets me excited, and the character comes second. That allows me to choose a character who will suffer the most in the situation I've created.

For you, it might be something else entirely. Maybe you come up with the character first and grow the story from there. Ask what's the worst thing that can happen to this character. If you have a great setting, ask who would be conflicted about being there. It's that creative inspiration that sparks your story idea.

Once you have your spark, make it hurt.

Your Homework Action Items

1. Figure out what aspect of a story inspires you to dig in and write.

2. Subscribe to and consume content that will put inspiration in front of you.

3. Ask “What if?”

4. Fill in the gaps with conflict.

5. Have fun.

What resources do you use to spark story ideas? What type of idea will spur you to commit to an entire story? Feel free to share the details with us down in the comments!

A note of thanks from the WITS Team!

This is the 1500th post here at Writers In the Storm. What a glorious journey it has been to build this community with all of you. Thank you for reading! And how fun that we are celebrating such a milestone with Alicia, our newest contributor! Please give her a warm welcome.

About Alicia

Alicia Ellis decided to write books about ten minutes before graduating law school. She's now an Atlanta attorney, but she moonlights as an author, electronics junkie, and secret superhero. With degrees in computer science and a healthy diet of pizza and fiction, Alicia loves all things high-tech and unreal. She writes fantasy and science fiction for young adults.

---

Girl of Flesh and Metal

Lena's cybernetic arm was supposed to help her—not turn her into a monster. Now, she's stuck with it, and her friends are terrified of her.

And maybe they should be.

The arm’s artificial intelligence takes Lena’s thoughts to the extreme. It acts when she doesn’t tell it to, even when she’s asleep.

Ever since she got the new limb, she’s been sleepwalking and waking in odd places. To Lena, this is just another example of how CyberCorp—her parents’ company and the manufacturer of the arm—screws up everything.

As the rollout of CyberCorp’s new android approaches, a murderer targets children of the company’s employees. And thanks to her sleepwalking, Lena doesn’t know what she was doing during the murders.

When the evidence points to her, Lena decides to prove her innocence—or her guilt.

Top image by Pexels from Pixabay.

by Becca Puglisi

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about differentiation—how we can make our stories stand out from all the others. Thanks to COVID-19, consumers are being more careful with their money, which means they’re very likely buying fewer books. With the estimated 1,000,000+ books being published each year, ours need something to set them apart, something that will jump off the shelf and grab a potential buyer’s attention.

How do we elevate our ideas?

I took a good look at some books that grabbed me straight off and continue to stand out in my mind as incredibly memorable. Here are some methods those authors used to originalize their story ideas and turn them into something truly groundbreaking and never-before-seen.

1. Rule-Breaking Genre

This is where we take the rules of our specific genre and either tweak them or rewrite them altogether. A good example of this, love it or hate it, is the Twilight series. Meyers threw the old vampire rules out the window and invented her own: undead creatures that can live in daylight and have sparkly skin, for crying out loud. One of the reasons this series did so well was because she took a popular genre that had gotten a little tired and rejuvenated the whole concept.

Ilsa Bick did a similar something with her Ashes trilogy. Her zombies weren’t created by a biological weapon or an accident in the lab; they were the result of an EMP attack that scrambled the brains of everyone between the age of puberty and roughly 30 years old. And if you got bit by a zombie, you didn’t turn into one. You just got eaten. Still terrifying. These changes created an interesting post-apocalyptic dynamic.

So, if you write in a genre where certain rules apply, start over. See which ones you can revamp (remembering to explore the new rules from every angle and plan them out for consistency) to switch things up for your story.

2. Spliced Genres

Sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the genre; instead, you can combine more than one of them to create something new. One of my favorite reads of all time is Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book, which is part futuristic time travel and part historical fiction during the Black Plague. Another is a book called Berserker, which takes place in the 1880s American West but features a family of Viking descendants with supernatural powers granted by the Norse gods.

When these authors were done writing their stories, I bet they felt like the chef who first combined strawberries and chocolate or mac and cheese. Eureka! Something new and amazing.

3. Upside-Down Preconceived Ideas

I find this in stories based on ideas that go against cultural norms. In Neal Shusterman’s Scythe books, technological advancement has virtually eliminated death, leading to an overpopulation problem. So certain individuals called scythes are tasked with culling the herd. This practice—abhorrent in the real world—is unilaterally viewed as necessary in Shusterman’s society.

Minority Report does the same thing with the notion of people being innocent until proven guilty. The author turns that idea around in his created world, making it a good idea (in the beginning, at least) to arrest people before they can commit a crime.

These stories are compelling simply because they make readers think. They get them seeing things from a different perspective. Keep in mind that it doesn’t always have to be a good idea that’s villainized. You can also take something historically considered to be unethical and turn it into something good. Robin Hood’s philosophy of robbing the rich to give to the poor is an example of this.

4. Unorthodox Characters

This is by no means a new idea, but it’s so important that it bears repeating. Characters are the heart of any story, and they’re primarily responsible for pulling readers in. They need to be relatable and well-rounded. But it also helps if they’re a little unexpected.

Stephen King does this masterfully (along with pretty much everything else) with his Holly Gibney character. She suffers from OCD, a sensory processing disorder, and is somewhere on the autism spectrum—not the kind of person you’d expect to find doing detective work and running a private investigation firm. But some of the qualities stemming from her disabilities make her really good at what she does. And we love her because of the idiosyncrasies that make her unique.

When you’re creating your characters, please make them interesting. Delve into their pasts to understand why they are the way they are. The Character Builder at One Stop for Writers is a great tool for simplifying this process.

5. Distinctive Voice

One specific way to make your characters stand out is through their voice. It’s easy to get drawn into a story when the protagonist or narrator has an intriguing way about them. Take the first few lines from Franny Billingsley’s Chime:

I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged. Now, if you please.

I don’t mean to be difficult, but I can’t bear to tell my story. I can’t relive those memories—the touch of the Dead Hand, the smell of eel, the gulp and swallow of the swamp…

This character’s voice doesn’t sound like others I’ve read. It’s not just the word choice and style that are pleasing to the ear. It’s what her words say about her as a person. For one thing, she starts off with a confession. What kind of person does that? And secondly, she says she can’t bear to tell her story, but you know that’s exactly what she’s going to do for the next few hundred pages. This is a person I’d like to spend some time getting to know, and it’s largely because of her unique and interesting voice.

It’s worth the time and energy to really get to know your character and figure out how they should sound so you can write them consistently from page one.

6. Uncommon Setting

Some settings are so unusual and vivid that readers are all too eager to fall into them. The best example I’ve seen of this is Tad William’s Otherland series. It’s set in the future when people can plug into the Net and live, work, blow off steam—do anything, really—through virtual reality. Any world that could be imagined can be created there, such as a warped version of Oz, a magical ancient Egypt, Xanadu, a cartoon kitchen with angry salad tongs and a frozen queen in the ice box... As the characters are swept from one strange and beautifully imagined world to another, readers are taken along for the ride.

Another example is The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, about an orphaned boy who is raised by ghosts. Most of the story takes place in (you guessed it) a graveyard.

Unique locations won’t work for every story because the settings will often be connected to the overall plot. But we always have options.

Don’t settle for ho-hum places. If you have the choice between a dining room table and an outdoor café on a windy day, go with the latter. And learn how to write your settings well, because no matter how interesting they are, if the description falls flat, readers are going to skim past it.

7. Unexpected Villain

Sometimes, we get sucked into a story because the stakes are so high, we’re not sure how the characters could emerge unscathed. A terrifying villain (who isn’t stereotypical) is one of the best ways to ensure high stakes. Some of the most daunting antagonists in literature weren’t megalomaniac bad guys or power-hungry organizations. Consider, instead, a xenomorph that bleeds acid and lays its eggs in its victim’s stomachs (Alien series), a mentally unstable fan (Misery), or a psycho with serious mommy issues (Psycho).

Like settings, villains are highly plot-driven. Your character’s overall goal will help determine who your antagonist is, because who’s going to keep him or her from getting what they want? The villain. But, again, you have choices. Don’t settle for simple or cardboard antagonists. They should be as nuanced as the rest of the cast, with motivations, wounding events, fears, and missing human needs that drive them to do what they do.

8. Surprise Resolution

Some stories are memorable because of the surprising way the main conflict is resolved. The movie World War Z, in many ways, is just another zombie tale. From start to finish, viewers are asking themselves the age-old zombie-genre question: how will the good guys survive? But the solution in this story is an unexpected one: “vaccinate” the healthy population with pathogens that the enemy can sense, making the humans undesirable hosts for the zombie virus. Instead of destroying the undead or avoiding them, humankind learns to live among them in plain sight.

Note: This method works best if you’ve got a story with seemingly insurmountable stakes.

9. Surprise Foundation

This one is the most interesting method, in my opinion, because it’s so hard to pull off. It’s similar to the Surprise Resolution in that it has a twist at the end, but the twist doesn’t resolve the conflict. Instead, it explains, with remarkable clarity, something foundational about the entire story.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a book that’s just made of awesomeness, about a teenage girl in Prague being raised by demons. Karou eventually falls in love with an angel, which is problematic, as you can guess. But it becomes more complicated when we learn that in her past life, Karou was a demon. She was killed because of her forbidden romance with the same angel, but her soul was saved and reincarnated as a human by her demon guardians. With that revelation, everything about the story clicks into place. Multiple questions are answered simultaneously in the most satisfying way possible.

This method is all about the twist reveal. But as with any element of writing, it can become overused. The Sixth Sense rocked everyone’s world, but it triggered an avalanche of stories where the main character turns out to be dead.

Your big reveal should not only be sufficiently twisty, it needs to be specific to your story so as not to become clichéd. If the surprise is used as a gimmick rather than one that ties naturally into the overall story, it’s not going to work. Use this method with caution, and plan it carefully.

Any of these methods can be used to freshen up a blasé story idea. Use them in tandem or focus on just one, but don’t sacrifice your plot line or characters in the process. The story must come first. If you use these methods to enhance your idea, you just might end up with something no one has ever seen before.

Which method resonates with you? Which is the most challenging for you? Are there any questions you have for Becca? Ask them down in the comments!

About Becca

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of books for writers—including her latest publication: a second edition of The Emotion Thesaurus, an updated and expanded version of the original volume. Her books have sold over 500,000 copies and are available in multiple languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling. 

Top photo image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

by Barbara Linn Probst

A silver lining during this terrible pandemic has been the incredible outpouring of support for debut authors. One after another, Facebook groups have opened up their sites to promote authors, especially those launching their first books. They’ve offered interviews and other virtual opportunities to replace the canceled “in-person” ones. This generosity has brought debut novels to the attention of a wide and welcoming audience.

Extraordinary as this movement has been, it’s only step one.

Hearing about a book by a brand-new author doesn’t guarantee that people will buy it, read it, or review it. Something must happen to make a reader take that second crucial step of selecting that particular book from among the countless other books published each week.

What is that “something?”

Familiarity

It’s natural to gravitate to the familiar. If you’ve enjoyed a book about a crisis that reunites estranged siblings, then you’ll look for other novels that have similar themes, with the expectation that they’ll appeal to you as well. That’s the basis of Amazon’s “Customers who bought this book also bought…”

It makes sense. With so many books to choose from, we need ways to narrow our search. That way, we hope to optimize the chance of investing time (and money) in something we’ll end up liking.

This is why people tend to buy books by authors whose prior novels they’ve enjoyed. We expect to like the author’s newest book. And we will, unless our expectation is disproven. It’s the opposite for an unknown author with no “up front credit.” For an unfamiliar author, positive regard has yet to be earned.

Exposure and awareness

Seeing something “everywhere” brings a sense of familiarity, trust, and inevitability. It can be hard to resist feeling that “everyone” is reading a certain book right now, so it must be good. Certainly, some debut novelists have hit that jackpot. Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing, is a recent example.

For most new authors, however, that doesn’t happen. They have to build awareness interview-by-interview, tweet-by-tweet, hoping that readers will give them a chance. Debut novelists—and I’m one—are, in effect, competing for the attention of people who don’t have the time to read every book that comes out.

How do readers choose?

When faced with an array of novels by unknown authors, why do they give some a try and not others?

I posed this question on ten different Facebook groups for readers: “Would you give a new author a try? Which of these (if any) might make you buy a book by a brand-new author?” I followed this with a list of possible reasons, asking people to select as many as they wished.  Although I didn’t ask people to rank their choices, some did.

As a former researcher, I dislike ”forced choice” questions in which the possible responses are pre-determined; they don’t leave room for answers the researcher hasn’t anticipated. However, previous Facebook surveys had shown that I’d get far more responses by offering a list and I wanted to cast a wide net.

One of the items on my list was “seeing the book on this and other Facebook groups.” This was, of course, a version of “recommendation from a trusted source”—and no surprise that it was one of the reasons cited most often, since I was asking the question on Facebook! The popularity of the response was circular and predictable, given the population I was polling, so I set it aside; had I asked the question at live book club meetings, people would probably have told me that they picked novels that fellow book club members had praised.

The other options reference a book’s cover, title, awards, and reviews from Amazon, Goodreads, newspapers, and “trade reviewers” like Kirkus and Booklist. Within three days, there were 750 responses.

Overwhelmingly, what made respondents “give a new author a try”—other than a trusted recommendation—was the book’s cover and title. In other words, their first impression. That didn’t mean they would end up loving the book or even finishing it, only that it would motivate them to pick it up, open it, and purchase it. Together, cover and title accounted for fifty percent of the responses, with some people adding a note to apologize for “judging a book by its cover.”

Many people added another reason: the book’s short summary description. Recommendations on Goodreads and Amazon reviews were of intermediate importance. Many people explicitly said that they “didn’t trust” reader reviews, which they considered to be too subjective, not necessarily corresponding to their own taste, and suspicious—authors asking their friends to post excessively glowing reviews.

Awards and praise from newspapers, Kirkus, Booklist, and other professional sources didn’t matter very much to these readers. Awards came in lowest of all, although some respondents felt that an award was a “signal” that a book had merit.

Most people chose more than one reason. People who cited “cover” usually cited “title” as well, suggesting that the two work together to form an overall visual impression. If their first impression drew them in, they would read the summary blurb and then decide. Conversely, if the first impression wasn’t strong, most were unlikely to proceed further.

Obviously, this wasn’t a comprehensive survey. As with all studies, results were shaped by how the question was worded, who was asked, and how. Because the data was collected from readers’ groups, it reflects the perception of consumers—that is, people selecting a product—and not necessarily the perception of bookstore owners, bloggers, reviewers, or anyone in the book trade. For those groups, media reviews and awards may carry more weight.

What does this mean to authors?

The results offer some indications that debut authors may want to consider.

Looks Matter

If you’re a new author about to launch, keep an eye on book cover trends; a particular look may not be your “style,” but it may be what readers are gravitating toward. Remember priming theory: if your cover resembles the covers of successful books, that might be a good thing. You don’t always have to be unique.

Experienced cover designers know what catches a reader’s attention, especially in the thumbnail versions that appear online, so listen to what they say about font, color, and composition. At the same time, it’s your book and you have the right to ask questions and to speak up if the cover doesn’t feel right. If you’re hiring your own cover designer, don’t skimp or settle. If your publisher is designing the cover for you, ask for options and for the rationale behind the various concepts. The cover should reflect the story in some way, as well as being visually pleasing.

Titles Matter

It’s common for a publisher to want to change the book’s title, and the new title may feel strange or even wrong if you’ve lived with another one for a long time—as if your child started school and the teachers suddenly decided to change her name!

But the publisher may have a very good reason. Go on Amazon and search for books with titles similar to yours. If you find a long list, you may want to shift to something fresh. Go through your manuscript and look for phrases that capture an important aspect of the story. If you find a title you like, ask people what they think it means. A misleading title can backfire.

Decide Your Focus in Advance

Consider where you want to focus your energy as you prepare for your book’s launch. You can go high and try for endorsements from well-known authors or celebrities, awards, glowing reviews from newspapers and trade publications—with the idea that these will “influence the influencers” who can place your book where it will be seen. Or you can go wide and make friends with people who host book clubs, book fairs, or online groups for readers and writers—with the idea that these are real readers who will spread the word about your book to other readers. 

Neither strategy is “better,” but you may not have the time or resources to do both. As you work to convince people to “give your book a try,” you’ll have to decide which approach suits your story and temperament.

Remember, you only get one debut! And ultimately, your aim is to move from being an unfamiliar author to a familiar one—someone who makes people say, “Oh, I just love her books!”

What makes you most likely to buy a debut author's book? Do you have any other purchasing reasons, either for or against, to add?

About Barbara

Barbara Linn Probst is the author of much-anticipated Queen of the Owls, published by the visionary, award-winning She Writes Press. Queen of the Owls has been chosen by Working Mother as one of the twenty most anticipated books for 2020 and is the May 2020 selection of the Pulpwood Queens, a network of more than 780 book clubs throughout the U.S. To order or learn more, please visit http://www.barbaralinnprobst.com/.

A chance meeting with a charismatic photographer will forever change Elizabeth’s life. How much is Elizabeth willing to risk to be truly seen and known?

Click here to read more or to order the book.

Top photo image by InstagramFOTOGRAFIN from Pixabay.

A version of this piece first appeared on Jane Friedman’s blog on November 14, 2019