Live the Process – Creating Useable Ideas, pt. 6

Now that we’ve gone through the steps to developing a story, I’m going to put into action, hopefully in a visible way. There will be some lists, because that’s how my brain works. Those of you who mindmap or use other visual methods to brainstorm will come up with something a little different, and that’s great.

I decided to split this live process post up into two weeks, just because it’s a behemoth.

Scrivener Untitled Project

Story Collector

I use Scrivener to keep all my ideas, just as I use it for most of the writing process. Whenever I get an idea, no matter how big or small, it becomes a new page in my story file.

When I am close to starting a new book, I start a project file in Scrivener, and start collecting things to put in it. I start a project file for this story, using the novel setting, though it may end up a short story. So far, it’s untitled.

The first things I do when I start a new Scrivener project is add a folder for pictures, as well as a folder for notes. I will use these folders a lot throughout my writing process.

Heart & Soul

Let’s start with themes. Themes that are important to me are:

friendship
loyalty
doing the right thing
empowered women and men
diversity
trust
family
quirky characters

Genres I like are:

science fiction
action
adventure
modern times
future
steampunk

Out of this, let’s narrow down to a futuristic science fiction story about loyalty, friendship, and empowered women and men.

Many times I get an idea for a character first and wrap the story around that character. But say today I have no ideas, so I’m going to go searching for a character on whom to base my story.

I’m going to look at  playby blogs to get some ideas. Playbys are visual representations, or avatars, for characters used by forum and blog roleplayers. Playby blogs are very popular on tumblr, to help roleplayers looking for a face for their character. Often I see a photo and a character jumps to life in my mind.

I type “female playby” in the tumblr search.  You can look through the blogs that come up for specific features, which are often tagged. Male, female, hair color, skin color, and so forth. I often choose diverse models, because I feel there is not enough of them represented in stories.

The first person to come up is model Vickie Sorensen. She’s gorgeous, exotic, and really interesting to me, so I’m going to base my main character around her. I search her name on Google for a few more photos of her, download them, and add them to my Scrivener file under a new category, Photos. I also create a main character page for her under Characters, and I insert one of the photos.

It helps to have a name for her, and the name Xavara pops into my head. Usually that doesn’t happen, and I end up using name generators and creating lists of names. Xavara sounds futuristic, and it has a nice sound to it. I pick the last name of May, and I have a character.

Monster Hunting

Now we need a bad guy, someone or something for the main character to fight, causing the progression of the story.

There are three main directions to go with an empowerment theme. I could start in a normal society with a secret/new evil, a dystopian society, or I could start in an empowered society where something encroaches on that empowerment. I’m going to take the normal society route, which in literary terms would be called the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey is a common narrative used throughout history of a normal person turning into a hero to save their society or ideals.

Let’s create an evil for the hero to fight. Xavara May lives on a futuristic earth, and let’s say space travel is common. So let’s have some big, bad aliens who want to come and take over earth. But I want to put a personal face on this monster, so I’m going to have someone close to her betray humanity. Xavara gets tangled up in the plot, and takes on the task of stopping them.

This time I will use name generators first, and find a good villain name. Seventh Sanctum is the first place I go for names of people and places. Serendipity has some useful generators as well. A Google search will bring up many other great generators. Caldr comes up on Seventh Sanctum’s evil name generator, and I kind of like that, but I’m going to play with it a little. Maybe Calder? Caalder? Kaldar? I chose the last. Kalder doesn’t really need a last name right now for me to envision him, so I’ll just stick with that for a bit. Picking my image for him is a little harder, but searching “male playby” on tumblr yields Willy Cartier, and I think he will work. So now my great evil has a face.

I still need to develop an alien race, but I’m going to save that for the brainstorming session. All I need to know right now to get started is that they want to own earth, and they will do whatever it takes to get it.

Up Next

Next week I will brainstorm some details for my story, and come up with a setting, some obstacles, and add some secondary characters.

Related Posts:

Level Up – Coming Up With Useable Ideas, pt. 5
Write What You Like – Coming Up With Useable Ideas, pt. 2
The Idea Game – Coming Up With Useable Ideas, pt. 1

Original article: Live the Process – Creating Useable Ideas, pt. 6.

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