How Does an Idea Become a Story?

a way too complicated analysis of the process, complete with shameless self-promotion

Photo by Amy Vann on Unsplash

It all happens in a cat's twitch.

It starts with a mood. The mood sets the tone. Then comes the idea.

I can't atomize the process any further than that.

Mood, tone, idea.

Mood: I'm feeling a little out of touch with the insanity of the world right now.

Tone: I sort of feel like joking about it, so whatever I write about will be darkly humorous (but I know reality will creep in from the outside and color the whole thing whether I like it or not).

Idea: What if we lived in a world where people eBay-auction the body parts of a famous person?

The idea isn't necessarily related to the first two. More often than not, the idea's been kicking around in some form for a while. But something about it has called to me. Perhaps it contains hints of the mood and tone that have been set. At any rate, it’s here, so…

Now what?

The idea needs an angle, or as I like to call it, a "problem". Because without a problem, an idea is just an idea, not a story. Coming up with the problem gets you closer to the story.

Now, sometimes the problem is hinted at in the idea: An outlaw on the run from a posse has to deal with a creature in the cave where he's hiding. If he runs, he's exposed to the posse. If he stays, he's toast.

Other times, the story's problem has to be formulated post hoc, like the aforementioned one about the eBay body parts traders. In that one, the problem is the deterioration of the central relationship in the story, which itself is a metaphor for the bigger problem of how to keep our humanity intact in a disgracefully unhinged world. Stories like that are harder to write, their problems and solutions more difficult to tease out.

Ok, so now we're in a mood, which has set a tone, and we called to mind an idea, and it needed a problem. All we have to do now is write the story and work toward a solution. In other words, all you need are verbs.

Ah, but not so fast. You can't really get away with having the problem stated and then arrive at the solution and end the story there. I mean, you could, but that's a little one-dimensional and teaches us nothing.

Problem: A dragon is guarding the treasure.

Solution: Kill the dragon.

Story over? Well, yeah, of course it is.

But what if we first present a false problem and have our hero attempt a false solution to it?

Let me explain.

I once wrote a story about a truck driver who picks up a hitchhiker who tells him he's late for his own funeral. (His wife always told him that one day he would be, you see.) It doesn't take our hero long to realize that the dude is in fact a gray-ass stink-ass purple-ass corpse. My guy hits the talky cadaver in the chest with a tire iron and kicks him out of the cab and hauls it out of there.

That's his the first attempt to solve the problem. But it’s not the real problem. It’s a false problem. How do we know it’s a false problem? Well, let's put it this way: Do you feel satisfied with that ending? Forget not knowing anything else about either one of these characters. Do you feel like something else needs to happen in order for the story to have a proper resolution?

So did I.

False problem: There's a dead guy in my truck.

False solution: Hit him with a tire iron and drive the hell away.

Real problem realized: The guy is late for his own funeral.

Real solution realized: Give him a funeral.

It happens in that order. And notice: The real solution solves both the false problem and the real problem.

So my guy turns his truck around and goes back. In other words, he too knows that caving in the dead guy's chest with a tire iron is a false solution to his false problem. So I had him recognize the real problem and come up with the real solution on his own.

He's hauling a load of bluestone through the night, therefore he's got a dirt shovel on him. Do truck drivers hauling bluestone have dirt shovels on them? I don't know. But by this point, a detail like that doesn't matter. I give him a shovel, and he uses it to dig a hole for the hitchhiker to whom he'd previously been very rude. The corpse watches him patiently as he digs.

When he's done, cursing and sweating, he looks up to see that a half dozen undead corpses, all old and in various states of decay, have gathered.

My guy gets up and helps the dead man into his grave. He then delivers an impromptu eulogy as best as he can, pausing once or twice to ask the dead man things about his life that he can talk about. When it's over, my guy is crying, and the dead man has a satisfied look on his face.

My guy covers him up and then realizes he's got to do the same for every one of the funeral attendees. It takes him most of the night. At the end, he's spent and weeping, and in his voice I get to utter a few thoughts about life and death and how no one ought to go with too few words. Every one of those funeral attendees would have passed away through silence had my guy not come along.

As a reward for sticking with the story for this long, I give the audience what you call a “kicker” ending. As the trucker gets back onto his route, he radios his dispatcher. He himself is going to be late, because there's a line of you-know-whats shambling out of the back of the Sunset Home for the Elderly.

We don't need to see the rest of the story. We can leave our guy to his new problem. He already knows the solution. It's a proper ending.

Now, I have to confess that the story wasn't written very well. It was a fun idea, sort of an EC Comics throwback without the gross-out ending. It's the kind of idea I loved when I was first starting to devour all the greats of Weird Fiction, which this story technically falls under. But I didn't write it well because I was still learning. (I'm still learning, but that's beside the point. I'll probably never stop learning—few writers do—but that's beside the point as well.) So the story never saw the light of day.

But it's a good example of how it's done. First the mood (feeling a little down about death and departure), then the tone (death and dark humor are like chips and cheese), then the idea and the problem (ahh, late for my own funeral, of course, I've been wondering when this idea would take shape). Then the actual cognitive work begins, and most of it is a conscious effort to keep everything chugging along the way it ought to chug.

Now, take that process and blow it up like a balloon and you have a novel. Twist it around a bunch of times until it looks like a poodle and you have a serial like Agony Rats.

Problem: Wade Tallow is being blackmailed.

Problem: Jurgen Ganz needs a gold offering plate, but it's warded by a spell, so he can't get it himself. Plus blood has to be spilled in order to obtain it. He needs to force someone else to do it.

Problem: Jen Quill is an agony rat, someone who feeds on other people's pain, only she doesn't know what to do with it once she's got it.

Problem: Tork and Mithras, agony rats of a different stripe—they know what to do with the pain they take—are looking for something they call the Heart of Hearts. (Jurgen Ganz is looking for it too. And Jen will soon be looking for it, and so will Wade. The Heart of Hearts is our Maltese Falcon.)

Problem: Detective Kase Milian is on the scene because of all the murders. (Did I mention there have been murders?) And soon he'll close in on Ganz, and Wade, and Jen, and Tork and Mithras, and maybe others.

There are false problems embedded in the story that our friends will soon realize are just that (some of them already have), and they'll realize this is the case because their false solutions will have failed to work (some already have).

In other words, problems consistently give rise to more problems.

These are the gears I've installed. Now I need to turn them. Heading toward solutions is the way to do that.

That's how it goes. That's how an idea becomes a story. You take problems and then throw a bunch of verbs at them.

And so the work begins.