WXH 10.2: What do I do now?
I’ve been following the Writing Excuses Podcast for years now, and this season they’re going to be following a writing master-class format, including homework. Sounds like it might be fun, so I’m going to be following along and doing the writing exercises that they assign.
Episode 2 is about idea development. Taking your idea-gem and polishing it into something suitable to be the centerpiece of your story. I’ll be working with the five ideas I generated for the last homework assignment.
The Homework
Using last week’s five story ideas (or five new ones):
Take two of them and combine them into one story.
Take one and change the genre underneath it.
Take one and change the ages and genders of everybody you had in mind for it
Take the last one and have a character make the opposite choice.
Take two and combine
Two of the ideas I developed last week – a city’s genus loci in the person of an old homeless woman – and mysterious evangelists not handing out a pamphlet to you seem to go together well, so let’s extrapolate that into a postmodern occult setting where supernatural forces coexist with underground secret societies that exist to exploit them.
Maybe there are a number of competing factions, including urban shamans who respect and revere the city-spriits, and more organized groups that seek to use them as a resource.
Take one and change the genre
The post-apocalyptic train idea stolen shamelessly from Snowpiercer could use a bit of obfuscation, so let’s change the genre to Space Opera. Instead of a train, it’s a generation ship, lost between the stars, left alone for so long that the inhabitants have forgotten that they’re on a ship.
We can even keep the post-apocalyptic flavor simply by setting it not after the fall of Earth civilization, but after the collapse of stellar civilization.
Take one and change the ages and genders
In Shadow Decade my protagonist is a woman nearing 40 suffering from a ten-year memory loss, assisted by a male social worker of about her own age. Switching that around, let’s make Erica an Eric, say he was only ten the last he remembers, so he’s twenty now, a per-adolescent in the body of a young adult.
The book becomes YA and will deal with issues similar to those presented in Tom Hanks’ movie Big, except there’s no going back; the fallout of dealing with social situations you’re unsocialized for will take the forefront and displace the culture-shock.
Just Because, I’m also going to shift the genre from cyberpunk to Urban Fantasy. A decade ago Eric was taken by faeries, and has just now been returned to his mortal life.
Take one and have a character make the opposite choice
In the 19th-century African American barber story, I never really defined what choice the barber made, but assumed it would be either to spill the beans or keep silent.
What if, instead, he decided to blackmail these powerful men? Not out of altruistic desire to make them change, but out of greed? What if he’s an anti-hero, and nobody’s hands are clean?
Maybe that sparks an all out war in the town between the barber and his network of blackmailed clients and the industrialists looking to get him out of the way. And that’s what our actual protagonist – an innocent Native American trader already unused to the white-man’s towns – walks into.
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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