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From Idea to Story by Devaki Khanna

Readers often wonder how authors get ideas for stories. You can get ideas for stories from your environment. If you are an observant person, the habits, behavior and motivations of your social circle could give rise to ideas for several stories. If you’re the imaginative sort, an image—of someone driving on a road late at night, or of children finding wolf pups in the snow—could be the basis for a story.

How can you tell if your idea can become a story? Begin by asking questions. For instance—who are the children who find the wolf pups in the snow? Where do they find these pups? What do they decide to do? Why do they decide to do what they do?

Can your story be written as a novel?

That depends on how you develop it. You could choose to focus on just one incident, and write a short story. Or you could show how the plot you create leads to your characters’ development. For instance, the children who find the wolf pups in the snow could decide to drown them—this makes a rather grim story about childish cruelty. Or they can decide to raise the pups, which leads to all sorts of developments.

You have an idea for a story, based on the concept of the Good Samaritan, which you want to write as a romance. A person who is left for dead on the road is assisted by a passerby which eventually leads to a relationship. You begin by thinking of appropriate characters. Your heroine is a young woman, driving home late at night, coming across an unconscious, wounded man lying in the middle of the road, with no identification or money.

You can develop scenes—the almost empty, dimly lit road; the speeding car with its blazing headlights that brakes suddenly as the driver spots the body lying in the middle of the road; the driver getting out and revealing herself as a woman…

How do you develop characters? Characters develop in response to conflict. For instance, the woman driving the car. Is she coming home late from work or from a party? Is she a doctor or a nurse or just a passer-by? Does she have a mobile, which she can use to call an ambulance? Will she go with the wounded man to the hospital? How will her family respond if she comes home late, and tells them the story of the wounded man? Will they let her visit him in hospital? The answers to these questions, and the reasons why she behaves as she does, will lead to her development as a character.

Suppose you decide that you don’t want this woman to be the heroine of your story; she disappears after calling the ambulance and handing over the wounded, unconscious man to the paramedics. You want the wounded man to suffer from amnesia so that he can be helped by a sympathetic nurse or psychiatrist at the hospital. You could then choose to start your story in the emergency room when the man is brought in, or begin the story when the man regains consciousness in the ICU but has lost his memory. Your story could be told from the point of view of the nurse who’s assigned to care for him, or the psychiatrist who undertakes to help him recover his memory. You will then concentrate on the relationship between the nurse/psychiatrist and the patient, focusing on how she helps him recover his memory.

How do you build the storyline, after you have developed the idea so far? Try to think through what might happen in the real world if such a situation took place. Perhaps the hospital would have the man’s photograph put on news channels—print and television—within the city, and then nationwide, to discover his identity. The police might also get into the act, by taking fingerprints. What would they discover if they did so? Is the amnesiac just a pedestrian who was unfortunately knocked down while returning home from work? Or is he in possession of dangerous information, dangerous enough for him to nearly lose his life and endanger anyone else (including the girl in the car and the psychiatrist) helping him?

It’s up to you where you choose to take your story. However, you have to build up to the conclusion carefully and cleverly, using all that you have told us about your characters and their circumstances so far. Perhaps the wounded man’s parents have already been to the police and registered him as a missing person—in which case, they’ll arrive at the hospital within a day or so after he regains consciousness. He’ll still require psychiatric care, because he can’t really recall everything that happened before the accident took place. Or, the woman who rescued him is attacked in a drive-by shooting—and someone tries to kill him while he’s still in hospital. This means that his psychiatrist has to race against time to save him, while she helps him to remember why he landed up in hospital. Since we’re talking about writing romance novels here, it will lead to the development of a relationship between the wounded stranger and the psychiatrist assigned to his case, in both instances.

So, the basic rules for getting ideas for stories:

  1. Keep your eyes, ears and mind open—ideas for stories can arise from observation or imagery.
  2. When you get an idea, put it in context, using questions. Use the words who, what, where, why and how to get your answers.
  3. It is up to you to develop an idea into a short story or a novel. You have to decide how to express the idea suitably.
  4. The two major characters—hero and heroine—have to be put into situations of stress or conflict, so that we can appreciate their true worth.
  5. Select the major protagonists of your stories—you need to focus almost exclusively on them, giving us glimpses into their motivations and actions by telling the story from their point of view.
  6. Develop the story keeping in mind what might happen if your characters actually existed in the real world.
  7. Build up to the conclusion carefully, basing it on what you have revealed about your characters so far.
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Where do you get your ideas from?

doodlesI know this question is often met with derision from literary panels, but I think it is a relevant question to ask a writer. Writers get ideas from the world around them, but so does everyone else.

Perhaps the question should be—what makes this process unique for writers?

People who like to express their ideas through the written word come equipped with a specialist device manufactured from books and the worldview of their creators. When a ‘writer’ meets an idea and says hello, it triggers a series of unstoppable reactions which transforms the ‘germ of the idea’ into a narrative. The disparate units, the random details that float around in the information sphere, a faded memory, a suppressed cry, now becomes a song with meaning and purpose and structure. It is now preserved in a perfectly constructed capsule, equipped to protect and transport ideas to future generations.

Articles, poems, short stories, novellas, novels…they are snapshots of the past. They are letters from times gone by. We get ideas from the past so that we may speak to the future.

Here’s a litmus test for you to decide if you are cut out for telling stories with words. Write me a flash fiction tale in five sentences in the comments area inspired by a significant event in your college/university life.

And I will provide you feedback 🙂