The Ideal Story Idea Equation. Every writer I know, and probably every writer I don’t know, is praying for the Idea from Heaven. The perfect combination of elements that will create the best story you’ve ever written and take you where you want to be in your writer’s adventure. What we sometimes forget to emphasize is the Combination of Elements part. The Equation.
The Technicolor Idea Strike. Most of us have, on very happy occasion, experienced the exhilaration of a technicolor idea strike. A story concept, maybe a scene, appears suddenly, unexpectedly, like lightning in the mind, revealing something entirely new, previously unimagined. “This is it,” we cry out in creative ecstasy. “This is the story I must write.”
An Idea Is Not a Plot. The problem is that we don’t really have a story. We have an idea for a story, and an idea is only a beginning. A story, particularly in the commercial fiction arena, requires a plot with a beginning, middle and end. At best, our flashes of inspiration will get us through the opening scene, maybe the first chapter. Without lots more work and a much bigger brainstorm, the story tumbles downhill from there.
The Cocktail Party Scenario. Permit me to illustrate with a cocktail party scenario that goes something like this. Author stands at the edge of the party crowd to maximize observation potential. Fellow partier sidles over, discovers that Author is, in fact, an author and suggests some variation on the following. “I’ve got a terrific idea for a novel. Bestseller for sure. How’s about I tell you my idea, you write the story, we split the take fifty-fifty?”
The Peril of Underestimating The Storytelling Process. A giant misconception is in play here. This non-writer underestimates the writing process. Somebody once famously said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” The partier with the great story idea knows nothing about the bloodletting aspect of the writer’s craft. He doesn’t understand that an idea is not a story.
An Idea Is Only A Kernel. That kernel may possess the potential to grow into the next Nora King Mary Higgins Grisham opus or it may not. Either way, tons of nurturing, strain, frustration, doubt and even bloodletting must be applied between planting and harvest. A clever idea is a jumping off place but without the sweat equity required the storyteller is in for a hard fall.
The Equation Begins With Character. An idea flash may reveal intriguing, even startling circumstances, but those circumstances must happen to equally intriguing characters or the agent/editor/reader will soon cease to care. An intriguing character comes to life on the page, has a history fraught with complex experience, and a personality riddled with contradictions, like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. Such characters are complicated, often confused, and always in conflict with each other.
The Equation Continues With Conflict. Great storytelling is all about story conflict, and that conflict must have enough power to reach beyond the initial story idea. Enough power to propel the agent/editor/reader, nonstop and without much respite, from first scene to last with a riveting rollercoaster ride between, like in The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
A Powerful Story Idea Plants The Conflict Kernel Deep. A powerful storyteller cultivates that kernel through obstacles, frustrations, near misses and reversals as layered and complex as the characters themselves. Conjuring all of that requires opening the previously mentioned vein. A lightning flash story idea makes the first cut, then the real surgery begins.
The Ideal Story Idea Equation Is Simply This. Great Idea plus Characters We Care About plus An Excruciating Conflict Situation equals First Class Storytelling. Which is, of course, not simple to accomplish, but that’s the challenge which creates the conflict at the heart of your great writer’s adventure. Welcome to the rollercoaster.
Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com
A Wrong Way Home – Alice’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 1 – is a FREE Kindle eBook HERE. Enjoy!
Alice’s latest novel is A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 5. Available HERE.
Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving. “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”
Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.
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P.S. These two pics are years-back shots of our grandkids. Maya after winning a Tai Kwan Do Championship she didn’t think she should even enter. Julian, well, ready to take on the Hulk. They must have Go Confidently mugs of their own. In fact, Grandma is confident that they do. Alice Orr – 
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, as a storyteller, I long to decode its secret. I need to know why it has remained the narrative star it is for so very long with such a vast audience. What exactly did Charles Dickens create that keeps us coming back year after year to be absorbed yet again by this tale?
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because it is essentially a ghost story, filled with things that go bump in the night, most literally, in Scrooge’s case. In the old Alistair Sim film version, which I favor, the gloomy black and white medium, the booming apocalyptic sound effects, Ebenezer’s perpetual scowl. All of it draws me back again year after “rolling year.”
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, as a human being on the path of my life in this world, there is a wound in my heart. It is a deep hole, bored by the continual dropping of hot coals of malice or neglect onto that spot when I was very young. This hollow place begs, every day in every way, to be filled, and the only way to fill it is with love. But this love must be received and absorbed, and the problem is that the heart surrounding the wound has been singed by those hot coals into believing itself unlovable.
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because Ebenezer offers us an answer. He points us toward a road to take to a place where healing can happen, and that place is within ourselves, within each of our hearts. Action is required, of course, as is always the case where redemption stories are concerned, and Scrooge’s story is about redemption for sure. That action is love, in its active verb form. Please, indulge me if I now relate that call to action to myself.