Writing a Novel-Imagine an Idea

There are other ways to start a novel than with a character. Sometimes you get a great idea for an event or a situation for a novel, but with no idea who the characters will be.

For example, I once had a story idea about a personal computer falling in love with its user. By itself, it’s just an idea. You need to add details to it to make it into a story. Who was the user? Why was he/she worthy of being loved? How did the computer gain consciousness and develop feelings? Ideas by themselves are plentiful and nearly worthless. Ideas that have been developed with concrete details are priceless.

What If?

A good way to come up with story ideas from situations is to use “What If” thinking.

• What if an ignored girl became invisible one day after years of not being seen by others?
• What if there was an overcrowded world where the entire adult population committed mass suicide, leaving the world and its resources to their children? (I actually wrote this one.)
• What if there was a supercomputer that controlled a country’s defenses and it refused to act when war broke out? What if it forced the people to prove they were worthy of being protected?

How to Use an Idea Effectively

The trick to using an idea/situation as the basis of a story is to add the human element to it. Who is most affected by this situation? Who stands to gain from it? Who will lose because of it? You tailor your situation to a set of particular characters and suddenly, you have a story.

In the case of the second example above (the overcrowded world), I wrote the story from the perspective of the eldest child of a family on that world on the night before the adults implemented their plan to save their world and provide for their children’s future.

The son wanted to leave the planet because there was no future for him, no opportunity for him to find meaningful work due to the overcrowding and diminishing resources. His parents refused to let him leave because in their culture, home was everything. That night they committed suicide with all of the other adults and in the morning, the son found a new world with renewed resources and much work to be done. In his grief and shock, he finally understood his parent’s insistence on the value of home and took on the responsibility of staying.

The human element to the idea is in the details – a specific boy who is affected by the adults’ plan, a particular culture that values home so highly that the adults are willing to take drastic action to provide for their children’s future.

Benefit of Using an Idea to Start a Story

The benefit to starting with an idea is that you practically have your “elevator pitch” already done. Your “elevator pitch” is a sentence or two describing your story, short enough that you could recite it within 10-15 seconds (the time a short elevator ride might take). Your What If statement can serve as your elevator pitch, though it may need some tweaking to add in some of those specific details.

Moral of the Story (or Idea)

You can start a story with an idea rather than a character. Just make sure that you round out that idea by identifying specific characters who will be affected by it.

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