[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
Humans are idea-generating creatures. This has been a good idea for us over the span of our existence. At least, a good idea for the species, even if certain individuals come up with bad ideas that can be detrimental to themselves and others around them. And certain extremely cataclysmic ideas that turn out to be so successful they could wipe out the entire planet if not carefully controlled. Thankfully, unless our setting or worldbuilding requires the end of the world, or at least a serious threat of it, we won't have to go that far in our writing.
More practically, though, one of the things that can plague a writer is having either no ideas that look like they will work, or an overabundance of them demanding their place at the table. An author panel at one of my two conventions for the year suggested that if you have too many ideas, call them all to the boardroom and make them present their cases as to why they should be written. The ones that have the most detailed proposal and the most work done already in becoming a story win that round of your attention and skill, and the others go back to the office to continue working on their proposals for the next round. (Sometimes it helps to have an ideas file somewhere to keep them at.) This is as good a system as any, and is geared toward getting you to commit to a finite number of ideas until they get properly written out or you run out of words on them before completion.
If you do gift exchange writing, bingo cards, challenges, or other structured events, possible ideas are sometimes supplied by the person you're writing for, or a list of things chosen from a database of possibilities at random. If you think you can't come up with any good ideas, you can still home your craft by working off someone else's, and writing to spec is a useful skill to have in your toolbox of you plan on going into genre writing or if the format you are writing for has specific requirements, like scripts or graphic novels.
Mostly, though, when it comes to ideas, the common lament is that they're not coming at all, or that what seemed like a good idea at the time has suddenly vanished from your brain in the time between you thought of it and you are ready to put it down. It's not a block so much as a ghosting.
"Where do you get your ideas from?" writers get asked a lot, as if there were a well that ideas form in and then bubble up to the surface for passing creators to snag. The ideas always come from within, but they might be based on something interesting from without. Observations and the conclusions drawn from them are usually the source of interesting ideas. Things like "Wow, the captain and his first officer have a friendship that looks a lot like they're romantically involved with each other." Or "My, that detective certainly seems to have all the signs of neuroatypicality." Or "What might it be like if you had a world where everyone had the best life...except one child, who had to shoulder the burdens of everyone else?" Or even "What might it be like to give a seventeen year-old girl everything she ever wanted in a boyfriend?"
It doesn't actually have to be that lofty, though. "What would happen if X and Y boinked?" is a plot idea. As is "How would Series Zed work if everyone were furry? (Or not, if they normally are.)" Or "Who would win in a fight, A or B?" These are often discussions of fandoms and Fandom, and so everyone can write up their arguments, or draw them, or otherwise produce fanwork off of it. Odds are, you have ideas in your head, but there's usually some sort of stumbling block or thing in the way that makes us think those ideas aren't good enough, or we aren't good enough to write those things. Remember, You Are Good Enough. And it'll be practice, writing something that you're invested in, but not necessarily something that you want to try and market. (Or maybe it will be, when it's all done. You never know.)
This might help with a demonstration, so here's an idea that has been turning over in my head recently, and how it came to be.
I've been watching the Cartoon Network show Steven Universe lately (no spoilers, please), and one of the main themes that I've noticed the showrunners keep coming back to is the story of Rose Quartz. At the beginning of the series, Steven (and the audience) know Rose Quartz as the leader of a successful rebellion against Gems that were planning on destroying all life on Earth so as to remake it into a world more suitably perfect for Gems. Rose, and the Gems of her rebellion, are the heroes and saviors of the world, many times over. As time goes on, however, Steven is introduced to new characters, and each of those characters has a piece of the story of Rose Quartz to add to his (and our) understanding. Those pieces help make the story of Rose more complete. But also, each new piece makes the story of Rose much more complicated. I'm going to stress here that there's no reason for anyone to believe that the new pieces of information are false, so the story of Rose that's told is always true, but the version we heard at the beginning is significantly incomplete. Presumably, the Gems that are Steven's caregivers intended on telling him the more complete story when he was older, but they've been withholding a lot from him. So, among the many other thematic elements of the show (and there are plenty), one of the core conflicts of the show is about how much we tell children and whether lies of omission are acceptable to a child you think won't understand or would be frightened by the truth.
The show's answer, generally, has been no. It's not okay to hide things, even from children, especially where not knowing puts that child in danger. (And it's not okay for children to hide things from their caregivers, for much the same reason.)
Additionally, I've been watching the Rooster Teeth animation RWBY. RWBY follows (mostly) Ruby Rose, a young, cheerful, and talented girl training to be a protector of her planet from monstrous creatures created from pools of the element of destruction. There's a greater conflict slowly revealed over the various seasons, and while the signs are there for the careful viewer in the early seasons, it becomes exceedingly apparent in the third season that one of the characters knows far more about that conflict than they have let on, and their lack of completeness in information leads to disastrous consequences. Some time later, that character is told that they have to tell the full truth about everything of they continue to want help in the greater conflict, and the narrative suggests that this happens. Very recently, however, a new character revealed that even with the promise to be more transparent, this character has not told the entire truth of the greater conflict, which infuriates their allies and leads to one of the older characters telling Ruby not to lie when she is trying to tell a younger character that he can still be whatever he wants to be in life. There's a similar theme and arc here as in Steven Universe - a story feels getting retold as new information comes to light, and while that story has never been false, it has also not been complete, because the older characters have deliberately withheld the complexity of the story from the younger ones.
Which leads, in both Steven and Ruby's cases, to finding out about those things the hard way.
The actual idea that comes out of this background is "Boy, Steven and Ruby would have a lot to talk about with each other if they met, wouldn't they?"
And that's the idea. Nothing there necessarily about the structure of the story, nothing about what sort of circumstances would be needed to bring them together, nothing really about the plot at all. Just an idea. It might turn into a work, it might turn into a neat discussion point, or I might just file it away and enjoy the similarities.
That's one of my ideas. You?
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]Humans are idea-generating creatures. This has been a good idea for us over the span of our existence. At least, a good idea for the species, even if certain individuals come up with bad ideas that can be detrimental to themselves and others around them. And certain extremely cataclysmic ideas that turn out to be so successful they could wipe out the entire planet if not carefully controlled. Thankfully, unless our setting or worldbuilding requires the end of the world, or at least a serious threat of it, we won't have to go that far in our writing.
More practically, though, one of the things that can plague a writer is having either no ideas that look like they will work, or an overabundance of them demanding their place at the table. An author panel at one of my two conventions for the year suggested that if you have too many ideas, call them all to the boardroom and make them present their cases as to why they should be written. The ones that have the most detailed proposal and the most work done already in becoming a story win that round of your attention and skill, and the others go back to the office to continue working on their proposals for the next round. (Sometimes it helps to have an ideas file somewhere to keep them at.) This is as good a system as any, and is geared toward getting you to commit to a finite number of ideas until they get properly written out or you run out of words on them before completion.
If you do gift exchange writing, bingo cards, challenges, or other structured events, possible ideas are sometimes supplied by the person you're writing for, or a list of things chosen from a database of possibilities at random. If you think you can't come up with any good ideas, you can still home your craft by working off someone else's, and writing to spec is a useful skill to have in your toolbox of you plan on going into genre writing or if the format you are writing for has specific requirements, like scripts or graphic novels.
Mostly, though, when it comes to ideas, the common lament is that they're not coming at all, or that what seemed like a good idea at the time has suddenly vanished from your brain in the time between you thought of it and you are ready to put it down. It's not a block so much as a ghosting.
"Where do you get your ideas from?" writers get asked a lot, as if there were a well that ideas form in and then bubble up to the surface for passing creators to snag. The ideas always come from within, but they might be based on something interesting from without. Observations and the conclusions drawn from them are usually the source of interesting ideas. Things like "Wow, the captain and his first officer have a friendship that looks a lot like they're romantically involved with each other." Or "My, that detective certainly seems to have all the signs of neuroatypicality." Or "What might it be like if you had a world where everyone had the best life...except one child, who had to shoulder the burdens of everyone else?" Or even "What might it be like to give a seventeen year-old girl everything she ever wanted in a boyfriend?"
It doesn't actually have to be that lofty, though. "What would happen if X and Y boinked?" is a plot idea. As is "How would Series Zed work if everyone were furry? (Or not, if they normally are.)" Or "Who would win in a fight, A or B?" These are often discussions of fandoms and Fandom, and so everyone can write up their arguments, or draw them, or otherwise produce fanwork off of it. Odds are, you have ideas in your head, but there's usually some sort of stumbling block or thing in the way that makes us think those ideas aren't good enough, or we aren't good enough to write those things. Remember, You Are Good Enough. And it'll be practice, writing something that you're invested in, but not necessarily something that you want to try and market. (Or maybe it will be, when it's all done. You never know.)
This might help with a demonstration, so here's an idea that has been turning over in my head recently, and how it came to be.
I've been watching the Cartoon Network show Steven Universe lately (no spoilers, please), and one of the main themes that I've noticed the showrunners keep coming back to is the story of Rose Quartz. At the beginning of the series, Steven (and the audience) know Rose Quartz as the leader of a successful rebellion against Gems that were planning on destroying all life on Earth so as to remake it into a world more suitably perfect for Gems. Rose, and the Gems of her rebellion, are the heroes and saviors of the world, many times over. As time goes on, however, Steven is introduced to new characters, and each of those characters has a piece of the story of Rose Quartz to add to his (and our) understanding. Those pieces help make the story of Rose more complete. But also, each new piece makes the story of Rose much more complicated. I'm going to stress here that there's no reason for anyone to believe that the new pieces of information are false, so the story of Rose that's told is always true, but the version we heard at the beginning is significantly incomplete. Presumably, the Gems that are Steven's caregivers intended on telling him the more complete story when he was older, but they've been withholding a lot from him. So, among the many other thematic elements of the show (and there are plenty), one of the core conflicts of the show is about how much we tell children and whether lies of omission are acceptable to a child you think won't understand or would be frightened by the truth.
The show's answer, generally, has been no. It's not okay to hide things, even from children, especially where not knowing puts that child in danger. (And it's not okay for children to hide things from their caregivers, for much the same reason.)
Additionally, I've been watching the Rooster Teeth animation RWBY. RWBY follows (mostly) Ruby Rose, a young, cheerful, and talented girl training to be a protector of her planet from monstrous creatures created from pools of the element of destruction. There's a greater conflict slowly revealed over the various seasons, and while the signs are there for the careful viewer in the early seasons, it becomes exceedingly apparent in the third season that one of the characters knows far more about that conflict than they have let on, and their lack of completeness in information leads to disastrous consequences. Some time later, that character is told that they have to tell the full truth about everything of they continue to want help in the greater conflict, and the narrative suggests that this happens. Very recently, however, a new character revealed that even with the promise to be more transparent, this character has not told the entire truth of the greater conflict, which infuriates their allies and leads to one of the older characters telling Ruby not to lie when she is trying to tell a younger character that he can still be whatever he wants to be in life. There's a similar theme and arc here as in Steven Universe - a story feels getting retold as new information comes to light, and while that story has never been false, it has also not been complete, because the older characters have deliberately withheld the complexity of the story from the younger ones.
Which leads, in both Steven and Ruby's cases, to finding out about those things the hard way.
The actual idea that comes out of this background is "Boy, Steven and Ruby would have a lot to talk about with each other if they met, wouldn't they?"
And that's the idea. Nothing there necessarily about the structure of the story, nothing about what sort of circumstances would be needed to bring them together, nothing really about the plot at all. Just an idea. It might turn into a work, it might turn into a neat discussion point, or I might just file it away and enjoy the similarities.
That's one of my ideas. You?
