Before the Beginning

Probably the most often-asked question writers get is "Where do you get your ideas?" Very few people ever ask "What do you do with your ideas once you have them?" though that seems to me to be the logical next step. It seems a good many people don't realize that there is a lot of development work to be done in between having an idea and actually writing a story.

A story idea can be anything - a scrap of dialog, a scene, a setting, a situation, a character or two, a plot - that the writer...