I&E follow-along: Stage 2

Last week I kicked off this series of posts by talking about the preliminary planning I did for my new series (working title Island & Empire); today I’m going to expand on that.

(Note: these first few posts are past tense – this stuff’s all done, but I wanted to document the process from the beginning, which was way back last year.)

Stage 2: Gathering ideas

In Lesson 3 of How to Think Sideways, Holly talks about generating ideas on a deadline—priming your Muse (your unconscious mind) to offer up ideas on demand. This is a great technique to know, because for short stories in particular you may come across an opportunity in a very specific market and need an idea for it at short notice. For novels, however, I prefer to use a twist on this technique.

The thing about writing novels is that it takes a long, long time from the initial idea to having a final draft ready to send to an editor (or to submit to agents, depending what stage you’re at in your career). In particular, if at all possible you need to take a break between the initial completed draft and your pre-submission revisions, and that’s a great time to be working on your next project. So, this is where I take the parameters I set in Stage 1 and start mulling over how I’m going to put them into practice. In other words: initial ideas for character, setting and plot.

I began doing this way back in April 2012, whilst I was waiting for editorial feedback on The Merchant of Dreams, the middle book in my Elizabethan trilogy. I had already decided to write a new series set in a completely different world, and I based my initial prompts for my Muse on what I had enjoyed and disliked about writing the trilogy.

Positive: urban-based, action + intrigue

Negative: travel!

I knew I wanted to write something a bit more epic in scope, but continent-spanning treks (and sea voyages) were right out, and I’m also not interested in writing about war as the primary conflict. At first this didn’t seem to leave much “epicness”, because those two tropes are such staples of the genre. So I thought back to my non-fiction reading over the years and decided I might be able to do something that revolved around a trading city caught between much larger powers, a bit like Venice—hence the working title Island & Empire. If I don’t want my characters to travel the world, I need to bring the world to my characters!

Over the next year (and particularly between drafts) I jotted down ideas as they came to me: various reasons why this city might be remarkable enough to fit into the epic fantasy genre, as well as ideas for characters (I had one from an unsold short story that I particularly wanted to find a new home for). I didn’t commit to any of them at this stage; I discovered during my first run-through of HtTS that I’m very capable of coming up with ideas that seem good at the time, even exciting, but then when I extrapolate them they don’t lead in a direction that interests me. All I wanted to achieve was a foundation of raw materials to work with, so that when I was ready to start the project in earnest I wouldn’t be staring at a blank notebook page.

In between noting new ideas, I read through my worldbuilding notes for a project that I’d worked on for a bit between early drafts of The Alchemist of Souls, as well as much older projects that had stalled through lack of perseverance. Again I didn’t make any decisions on what or how much to use, just let the information brew in the back of my mind to see if it prompted any additional thoughts.

Thus by the time May 2013 came around and the last book in my trilogy was revised and handed over for copyediting, I was ready to move on to the next stage: working out which of these ideas I want to take forward. More about that next week!