A friend recently asked how I come up with ideas for short stories. I told him that getting ideas is easy–it’s the execution that’s a real terror. But I think what he was really interested in, and what most people really want to know when they ask that question, is how to transform “idea” into “story.” I’m still trying to figure that out, myself. While it seems premature to write about my process for creating short fiction, maybe writing about it will help solidify my thoughts on the matter. If not, maybe it will help someone else.
When I decide I want to write a short story, the first thing I have to do is select the idea to develop. Ideas are plentiful–I have a notebook full of them. I don’t go right to the notebook, though. First I brainstorm a little. Sometimes current events spark interesting ideas. Sometimes a memory surfaces that could serve as the seed of a story. Sometimes my brain yields other strange fruit. And sometimes I come up with nothing. Regardless of the results, I go through my notebook next and copy out anything that interests me right then–title ideas, story prompts, character observations. Between the brainstorming and the notebook review, I usually end up with a list of about fifteen items.
I narrow that list down to five or six things that most interest me. Sometimes, as with “Big Little Blonde,” one of them leaps out so strongly that I know what I’m going to work on with no further thought. Usually, though, I have about half a dozen that all look good.
When I need to narrow the field, I write a paragraph about each idea. How might I develop the idea? What other ideas could it combine with? What markets would I be able to approach with it? As I perform this exercise, one idea always begins to stand out. When I can’t stop at a paragraph, I know that’s the one I’m going to develop into a story.
I’ll talk about my process (or lack thereof) for developing the idea in a future post.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Kaye George // Mar 27, 2009 at 9:52 am
Sam, one thing that sometimes works for me: I take a story to its logical conclusion in my initial conception, then avoid that conclusion when I write it, to give a twist at the end. If I can manage it, I like a double twist. That’s the kind of story I enjoy, an O. Henry-type thing. If you don’t like twisty stories, this won’t work for you!
-Kaye
2 Terry Odell // Mar 27, 2009 at 10:00 am
That sounds SO much more professional than, “Well, I had this line I was just dying to use in a story someday.”
Not to mention I admire anyone who can write short to begin with. My attempts at short stories usually end up being a beginning, a middle, more middle, yet more middle. They’re supposed to reach a conclusion, but that’s the hard part.
3 Sam // Mar 27, 2009 at 10:15 am
Terry — that has always been my problem, too, and I’m starting to get a grip on it. I’ll probably talk about that in my next post.
Kaye — I do! I do like twisty endings! I’ll have to try that. BTW, I loved your story in the debut issue of Crooked.
4 How I write a short story part 2: Planning // May 1, 2009 at 7:51 am
[...] “Getting an idea” is the first step in writing a short story, but the next stage is more difficult: planning the story. Planning takes a lot of effort and time, but it’s worth it. Writing without a plan usually ends in, at best, a couple of pages that don’t go anywhere. At worst, I create a long, rambling draft that absorbs dozens of hours and makes me feel like a failure. An outline is crucial. To create one, I rely on a description of short story structure that I discovered last year: “A situation, a complication, a climax, and a denouement.” This simple definition changed the way I thought about short stories. [...]
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