Writing fiction by Bill Eaton

Ideas

The first in a series of articles by Bill Eaton.

Where can I get an idea for a story?

As a writer, you will answer this question time and time again.

Sometimes it will be difficult. You might feel you have no new ideas to write about, no wild plots to create, no interesting people or places to describe. It might get to the point where you think you might as well chuck it in and do something else instead.

Don't worry! Ideas are everywhere, as long as you know where to look.

Write what you know

One of the most common pieces of advice given to people about to start writing fiction is 'write what you know'.

This seems like common sense, but what does it mean? What do we really know?

At the most basic level we know ourselves, we have our own memories to work from. Memories are a fantastic source of ideas. Incidents we remember are often vivid and powerful. The fact we remember these incidents at all is often because they are vivid and powerful. When we write about our memories we do so with authority and passion, because we feel the emotion personally.

There are, however, some problems associated with writing from personal experience.

It might not be long before you run out of things to say - not all of us have travelled the world five times over or lived the life of a rock star or a super spy! It is a common complaint from publishers that novelists often have problems writing a second book because they have put all of their own experiences into the first one.

Also, if you know something too well, writing about it could be boring. It can feel like writing a report rather than embarking on a journey of discovery. As a result your writing style might become dull and lifeless.

If you restrict yourself to writing about your memories, you might become uncomfortable when the time comes to write in the voice of the opposite sex, or to describe a place you have never visited, or to create a character you have never met - all essential skills for a writer of fiction. If we write purely from memory we are not really writing fiction at all, but autobiography. To use personal memories to write fiction, we need a slightly different approach.

The key idea here is to relocate your memories. Change things around. Make the events you remember happen in a different place, in a different order, to different people. Try the following exercises to give you some ideas.

Exercise one

Write down your first three, separate, memories.

Now try to link them together in a story, but have the story happen to someone else.

Exercise two

Take an intense emotion you have experienced and give it to a fictional character who is not you, and place that character in a scene that is different to the one you experienced.

In both of these exercises you are taking emotions and memories you can write about with passion, and transferring them into situations and people you have invented.

Fortunately, as writers we have so much more than our own experiences to draw upon for ideas. There are many other things we 'know'.

Other people

Other people we know and the stories they tell us are useful sources of ideas - friends, relatives and colleagues or even people we know only vaguely. When we combine their stories with our own experiences we can create new stories.

Other stories, myths and legends

Stories come from other stories. Many wonderful stories are inspired by stories that have come before them, or combinations of stories. Films, fairy tales and legends are great sources of ideas.

This is not cheating! Every writer does it, often without realising it. Imagine yourself as a painter, mixing two colours together to come up with a different colour.

When film producers go to a studio to raise money for a project they have to present a short sharp pitch to make an impression. Often they will describe their script in terms of other films - Star Wars meets Gone With The Wind for example, to describe a love story during a great war in the future (stranger things have happened!).

Whenever you are truly stuck for an idea, consider the following exercises:

Exercise three

Think of two films you really like, preferably as dissimilar as possible: a romance and a thriller, a science fiction film and a western, for example. Now think of ways to combine the two: merge the plots, the characters and the setting, and see what you come up with. Many successful films simply retell classic stories in a different setting.

So we have memory of ourselves and knowledge of other people and other stories. What we know and what we have come to know.

Imagination

Finally, of course, we have our imaginations. The most important ingredient of all and the thing that will make the stories we write different to the stories anyone else will write.

Imagination at its basic level is simply asking questions and imagining the results.

What if?

Suppose?

"As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

This is the opening sentence from Franz Kafka's short story, Metamorphosis, possibly the most famous first line in literature. It is a great story, and it illustrates everything we have looked at in terms of the sources of ideas.

Of course Gregor Samsa's change into a giant beetle is pure imagination, although Kafka's descriptions of the insect must have come from research and his own observations. Equally, the story that follows this bizarre introduction is based on Kafka's own experience and observations of society. The whole story is a combination of invention and observation, imagination and experience, which started with a simple, if fantastic, 'what if?' question.

"The best source of fiction is the zone in which knowledge and the lack of knowledge meet, where you wonder."

- Josip Novakovich

Exercise four

Find an interesting, but enigmatic photograph, a glimpse of something real around which to weave your imagination - create names for the characters, base them on people you know if you like, give an idea of what they want from each other. What are they doing in this scene?

One final piece of advice: always carry a notebook. You never know when an idea, a dream or a snatch of conversation will crop up - get it written down before you forget it. It is pretty useful for shopping lists and phone numbers too!

Recommended reading

There are hundreds of books about creative writing, fortunately most of them simply repeat information. Here are a couple that I have found useful.

Creative Writing; ed. Linda Anderson. Published by Routledge and the Open University

This is a great textbook on the subject. It is big, but it covers everything, including non-fiction and poetry, complete with exercises and readings.

Fiction Writer's Workshop: Josip Novakovich. Writers' Digest Books

This is the best book of writing exercises I have come across. Once you have worked your way through this book you have covered all of the basic areas of fiction writing.

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2. Limbering up

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