So Shiny!

Is there anything a writer loves more than a new, shiny story idea? Well, maybe a book deal. But, on the creative side, a new story idea, freshly imagined, is pretty high up there on the list of things that get us excited.

Like all writers, I, too, love a shiny new idea, but as a pantser (someone who writes without knowing where the story is going) a new idea, for me, is really just that- an idea. Not a story. So when I get a new concept, I expect the road ahead to be long and twisting and I can’t be sure that it will ever turn into a coherent plot. It always has so far, eventually, but there’s the doubt.

So imagine my utter astonishment when I woke at midnight a few nights ago, and my brain refused to shut back off because it HAD to flesh out the entirety of a concept I’ve been kicking around for a while: Domes in a desert. That was it. Nothing but an image in my head.

Or so I thought. Then, from midnight to 4 am, with small children snoozing on both sides of me (It was our monthly Mommy Sleepover) I tossed and turned while the entire novel unfolded like a movie someone else had created. The worldbuilding, the magic system, the main character, the love interest, the antagonist–even entire scenes of dialogue just BAM! Right in my head. At first I was tempted to get up and write it down, but it was so detailed that the only way I really could do that would be to write the whole book, and that would take a while. But, I was wide awake–not in that half-sleep that steals so many book ideas–so I let myself enjoy the show.

Sure enough, it was still there, fully intact, when I woke up.

Yesterday I created 25 notecards in scrivener, one for each chapter (mine usually average out about 3000 words, so 25 chapters means a solid, middle-of-the-road word count of 75k) and I wrote a chapter summary in each one.

WHAAAAAAAAT IS HAPPENING?????

I raved about my awe and confusion on twitter and one of my fellow Pitchwarriors hit it on the nose- We got better. After completing the two months of revisions required by Pitchways, we’ve leveled up!

When I started writing No Man’s Land, I knew nothing about story structure aside from that instinctive knowledge that we all seem to have, to some extent, built upon lifetimes of movies, books, and TV shows. I hadn’t even read a craft book, and I didn’t know about inciting incidents, midpoint breaks, character wounds, etc, etc. I learned it all as I went, ripping apart drafts and rebuilding them, learning on the job.

But now. Now that structure map is a part of my neural networks. I’ve lived it and breathed it for months and months. Even my subconcious knows what each stage of a story demands, and it kindly filled those in for me.

AND I AM SO EXCITED!!!!!!

You see, the “putting words on the page” is the easy part, for me. Figuring out what should come next? That’s harder.

But now, for the first time ever, I have an entire novel mapped out. And I LOVE IT, YOU GUYS!

I’m still fine-tuning the comps, but for now, we’ll call it a Young Adult MAD MAX x ELYSIUM x X_MEN ORIGINS.

Something like these three GIFs, mashed together:

I can’t wait for you all to meet Dalia and Kade!!!!!!