How not to completely mangle your story idea

Now that you know how to come up with great story ideas, you need to know how to take those ideas, and turn them into stories.

You could, of course, just start writing. That’s what most inexperienced writers do. But if you start telling your story that way, without knowing where you’re going with it, or even how you’re going to develop the story, you’ll likely run into some problems.

You don’t want to do that. You’re sitting on an awesome idea with so much potential. You need a plan in order to conquer it—a blueprint that you can follow, that you know will produce high quality stories time after time. You need to have a solid writing process.

Unlimited story ideas! Three ways to make the muse work for you.

How cool would it be if, for one month, you sat down and wrote a completely original short story every single morning?

Can you imagine all of that material? That’s enough stories for you to publish your own short story collection!

It’s a nice dream isn’t it? But that’s probably all it will ever be: just a dream. And, as far as dreams go, this one seems pretty far fetched. The amount of new and creative ideas that you would have to come up with would be a bit overwhelming.

I have enough trouble coming up with ideas to write about on this blog, how could I ever come up with a completely original story every morning?

Well, do you want to know a secret? I can, and I do. Coming up with great story ideas is pretty simple, because I know how to make the muse work for me—not the other way around.

Why I’m embarrassed by my writing (most of the time) and why you should be too.

Your readers hate bad writing… Maybe that is why so many of us writer types become such snobs for “good writing.” You know, the type of flowery language and intricate sentence patterns that grace the pages of those classic novels we love so much. For some of us, every single time we sit down to write, no matter what it is we happen to be writing, that is the standard of “good writing” that we want to hold ourselves to.

Actually, most of the time we prefer to hold ourselves to the even higher standard, don’t we? Perfection is what we strive for. Perfection is our standard, and perfect writing is our obsession. Because we don’t just want everything we write to be perfect, we need everything we write to be perfect.

What artist could ever be satisfied with anything less?

Does that sound about right? Good. It should.

You should always strive to produce your best work in the end; but this innate perfectionism we all struggle with comes with a price.

So, you want to be a writer? well, you shouldn’t.

Do you know what it means to be a writer?

The answer to that question may surprise you—because if you’re reading this right now, you likely either A: currently call yourself a writer, or B: would like to some day call yourself a writer.

So before I go any further with this, I want you to take a moment and try to define what a writer is. Write it down, keep it close by, because your going to need it in a few minutes when I show you why you’re completely wrong about what it actually means to be a writer, and why you really shouldn’t call yourself one.

Are you not entertained?

We all know the iconic scene from the movie Gladiator: when Maximus (then known as The Spaniard) defeats six opponents single-handedly in just over one minute.

He had given the crowd the blood that they wanted, but as the dust settled after the one-sided battle, he wasn’t rewarded with the thundering applause he had come to expect—instead his actions were met with shocked silence. Frustrated at this lack of reaction, Maximus hurls his sword into the stands, spreads his arms wide, and asks the question that would be forever immortalized in the minds of 90’s babies around the world.

“Are you not entertained?”

It’s a process…

If you’ve been checking in on the Library over the past couple of weeks, then you know that I’ve started uploading the chapters to my current novel Alexium—and I’m guessing that you’ve also noticed the slightly lower quality of the writing in Alexium as compared to Hunters of Shadows. I expected this, and even gave warning about it in the introduction …