How to Choose a Story Idea
With a baby on the way, it’s pretty hard to make any big plans for 2021. (He literally could come any day, which is equal parts stressful and exciting.) That impacted my goal-setting for the year, and it’s especially going to affect my creative writing.
I still have ideas, though. Part of that is revising and building out a collection of maps, which I wrote about last week. I still want to create a map of the world with major cities, roads, and trade routes; maybe even some points of interest. And if possible, it would be fun to collaborate with Kim and let her add some design elements, particularly with text to add a kind of “finality” to the project.
It would also be cool to start work on smaller regional maps. As part of zooming in to make the world more mysterious, I’ll want to get very familiar with the areas I plan to write about. And a smaller map would allow me to think about local communities, smaller geographical elements (woods vs. forests, hilly terrain vs. mountains, etc.). But I doubt that will happen in the near future.
However, I do have plans for a couple different stories. And the fact that I’m legitimately excited about all of them makes me think that I’ve gotten back into the groove of regular writing. It also makes me wonder how to choose a story idea, especially when I'll have less time to focus on writing this year.
How to choose a story idea
My plan is to tackle a couple short stories, and only commit to writing one of them this year. If I do really build out a bunch of Varheim maps, then I’ll be much more familiar with the world. Hopefully that means getting away from Tenerim (the single location in Eel of Flotsam) and start exploring other parts in that world.
I’ve got two different ideas for novels, and those could begin with prequel short stories. (That was actually the purpose of Eel of Flotsam before it expanded into something much larger.) By getting into the heads of characters and familiarizing myself with the places they live, it would build a strong foundation to tell deeper stories...and possibly pull ideas from other scrapped projects along the way.
A revenge story about an escaped slave in the heart of Varheim’s biggest city? A twist on the “hero’s journey” concept that asks a question most fantasy novels overlook? A good old swashbuckling adventure that dives into the Shaper magic system I’m building?
I like all of these ideas, and there’s a growing list of them.
But my plans aren’t limited to fantasy. I thought up a writing prompt awhile ago of taking one of my favorite locations in Destiny (the Ishtar Sink region), adjusting it to fit my near-future setting, and exploring some of the pseudoscientific topics mentioned in Planes of Solace. I could also write from the perspective of characters I plan to integrate into future SciFi novels; again, it’s a tried-and-true way of exploring a new point of view.
Another option is taking my original opening chapters of a fourth SciFi book and creating a self-contained story. It would require quite a bit of work, but I’m much more excited by the notes I’ve written than I am about the current (unedited) version.
Which leads me to my next point.
Returning to No Room in the Sky
The one task I need to do but have no interest in is revising my fourth book in the No Room in the Sky series. I enjoyed the process of writing another SciFi book, and I’m proud of the direction things took. But I’m also aware that the quality of the book is...not great.
After spending a long time away from the project, it almost makes more sense to rewrite the entire thing from scratch. I have a few ideas for where that can start—there are pieces of the original book I want to keep, but they’ll have to go through some pretty big changes to fit.
And of course my scope for the entire series hasn’t changed. My original story, “Planes of Solace,” inspired a whole bunch of others. The first seven of them became a huge episode collection, which then expanded into three novels.
I’ve got plans for at least four more books, and the basic layout for a couple after that. I can’t promise I’ll ever get to that (or even get around to rewriting the fourth one) but it’s still exciting to think about.
Approaching how to choose a story idea is complicated, especially when you’re choosing between two different genres and worlds. I don’t know which way things will go yet. But I’m happy to know that my 2020 writing goal paid off: I’m finally back in the writer’s chair, and I can’t wait to start my next project, whatever it ends up being.