Part 1: The Initial Concept
Coming Up With Ideas and Fleshing Them Out Into an Actual Story
Building Your Idea Repository
Where do writers get their ideas from? It’s one of those open-ended questions that’s both easy and difficult to answer. The easy answer: they make them up! The difficult one: a variety of different sources that depends on the writer and may include some combination of fiction, nonfiction, news articles, dreams, internet rabbit holes, conversations with other people, conversations with themselves, real life experiences, and the miscellaneous vagaries of the waking mind.
Personally, I get a lot of my ideas from reading, particularly from historical nonfiction. (As an aside, I’ve never understood why people think history is boring when it contains some of the most bizarre, terrifying, or just plain bonkers stories you can possibly imagine. It’s probably how it’s often taught.) The other way I usually come up with ideas is just letting my mind wander. This also works well when you get stuck! I was a big daydreamer when I was a kid, and it’s a pretty similar process. Most of what I’m thinking about won’t pan out, but much like panning for gold, the trick is to be patient and keep your eye out for something that could actually be valuable.
Now, these little specks of ideas aren’t necessarily stories per se at this point. More like interesting fragments. Some already include vague ideas for characters. Others are just a location, image, or plot event. I try to write them down as soon as I think of them, just in case they’re useful. I even carry around a small notebook for this purpose. Most of them will probably never lead anywhere, but they’re still worth recording just in case. I have over 100 ideas recorded in my notebook, so there’s a variety to choose from. However, sometimes I’m more spontaneous if I’m near the end of a project and a good idea strikes me. My rule of thumb is to choose whatever excites me the most, unless I need to stick to a theme for some reason.
The Initial Concept
After flipping through my notebook, I found an idea that works well for this kind of exercise because of how open-ended it is. Here’s what I jotted down back in 2022:
An invading force is ordered to seize and hold a long-abandoned military base for reasons unknown to its soldiers.
When and where does this take place? Who’s invading? Who is my viewpoint character? These are all questions I’ll need to figure out before I go any further. Since I tend towards historical fiction, I’m probably not going to go for a modern or futuristic setting, but that still doesn’t narrow things down very much. It could be set anywhere from Ancient Egypt to early aughts Afghanistan. The setting will inform everything else in the story, so that’s where I’ll start.
The Setting
It took me some time to decide on when and where I wanted this story to take place, but I eventually settled on the Revolutionary War. It’s an era I find interesting, plus it seems relevant with America’s 250th birthday coming up. That gives me an era and a country, but Colonial America was huge, so I also need to decide on a region. I tend to go for a general, semi-fictionalized area rather than trying to perfectly replicate a specific location. Some writers will probably disagree with me on this, but I honestly don’t think it’s worth the trouble to make sure my setting perfectly depicts a real world place. Maybe it would be a nice Easter Egg for people from there, but it already takes me forever to write fiction without adding another major chore.
I’m a big fan of Southern Gothic and would love to give that a shot, so I’m going to opt for a story that takes place in one of the southern colonies. I’m thinking maybe the Carolinas, since I know there were Revolutionary War battles there, but that’s about as specific as I need to get.
Choosing a Main Character
I now have a setting and a basic concept, so the next step is to decide on my viewpoint character. This is very important because a story can completely change depending on whose perspective it’s being told from. In fact, I consider it to be one of the most important choices you can make in fiction, especially in horror fiction. One of the hallmarks of amateur horror is that the characters exist solely so that scary things can happen to them. They should be people before they are potential victims. Otherwise, the reader has no real reason to care what happens to them. Yes, I know there are many exceptions to this (H.P. Lovecraft’s somewhat interchangeable scholarly types, for example), but I’ve never been able to make a story with a generic protagonist work. Maybe that’s a flaw in my writing style, but to me, characters should be at the center of a story, not the scary thing. The scary thing works best if it hovers around the edge of the story, revealing itself a glimpse at a time.
If I stick to my original idea, I would probably be telling this story from a British POV, but I don’t necessarily have to. Ideas are just jumping off points, and the finished product will often be nothing like the original concept. I can also tell this story from a Loyalist or an American/Continental Army perspective. Honestly, any of these seem like they’d be interesting. There’s also the question of who the main character is. Are they an officer or an enlisted man? I could probably do a civilian perspective as well, but I’m not sure how many camp followers or other random people are going to want to hang out in a creepy swamp fort since they aren’t being ordered to stay there.
So, here are my main options:
A British POV: Has the plus side of being pretty unusual. Americans are usually the ones telling stories about the American Revolution, and we don’t often consider the other side. Also allows the MC (main character) to be completely unaccustomed to the area and climate. This unfamiliarity can really emphasize the strangeness of a place.
A Loyalist POV: Also fairly unusual, but without the benefit of the MC’s unfamiliarity. Unless they’re really far from home for some reason, I guess?
An American POV: Probably the most obvious choice for a Revolutionary-era story, for better or for worse. Also suffers from the same familiarity issue as the Loyalist POV.
I was having difficulty choosing between these three when a friend of mine suggested a fourth option I hadn’t even considered. (Thanks, Carl J. Calo III !)
A Hessian POV: German auxiliaries to the British army, in case your American history is a bit rusty. Has all the narrative benefits of the British POV, plus the additional one of probably not speaking much English. Often stereotyped as cruel mercenaries, but they were actually part of their prince’s standing army, which was hired out, rather than being a bunch of random psychos for hire.
I really like the Hessian idea, so I’m going to stick with that for now. The next step is to decide whether our MC is an officer or an enlisted man. Either could be interesting, but it really depends on the role I want him to have. Even an officer might not know why he’s there, but it could be interesting if there’s a clash between the orders he’s supposed to follow and his suspicion that it’s not in his or his men’s best interests to follow them. Alternately, he could be some poor grunt who has no idea what’s going on but gets suspicious when his commanding officer starts acting like something’s seriously wrong. The important question is What makes for the most interesting story? This is of course very arbitrary, so you’ll probably have to think about it a bit. After my own ponderings, I’ve decided to split the difference and make him a junior officer—high-ranking enough to have a little information, but not enough to be able to order everybody to evacuate if needed.
Deciding on a main character isn’t usually this complex, but I wanted to show how it can be broken down into parts if needed.
Our Story So Far (With Some Changes)
We have an idea, a setting, a main character, and maybe some kind of internal conflict. What we don’t have are specifics. What’s in the abandoned fort? Why would our MC be tasked with retaking it? Why was it abandoned if it’s strategically valuable?
While I don’t need to know what’s in the fort right this second, I can extrapolate from its being somewhere so isolated and non-strategic that whatever is in there probably can’t be moved somewhere else. Thus, a fort was built around it. This is something I can play up psychologically, since my MC would know that there’s something weird about a fort that apparently guards nothing but empty swampland. He could try to dismiss it as incompetence on the part of his superiors, but it already signals to him and the reader that something is off.
I’ve also been reconsidering the “long-abandoned” part of my original idea. If whatever the fort protects is of strategic value despite its location, it seems weird that nobody else would try to capture it. It makes more sense for it to either be currently occupied or recently (and probably unwillingly) abandoned. Maybe the Hessians find a lone American survivor, half-mad with fright and frantically trying to tell them something they can’t understand. I like this option because it makes good use of the language barrier and because it already establishes that something terrible happened here.
So, to sum things up, we’ve gone from:
An invading force is ordered to seize and hold a long-abandoned military base for reasons unknown to its soldiers.
to:
A Hessian regiment is ordered to capture an American fort located deep in the Carolina swamps. However, instead of the heavy resistance they expect, they find the fort ransacked and nearly deserted, other than a lone survivor who is half-mad with terror. Our protagonist, a young officer in this regiment, is tasked with interrogating the man to try to find out what happened, but the few words he can understand invite far more questions than they answer.
The first one is the germ of an idea. The second one is a story. It doesn’t explain everything, but it gives me a good start. There’s also an interesting character dynamic between two men who are technically enemies but whose interests may actually be aligned.
So, We’re Ready to Write, Right?
Not so fast.
I regret to inform you that I’m not an expert in Revolutionary War history. I like history and might remember a bit more about this era than people who don’t, but I don’t feel like I have enough of a background to write this story convincingly yet.
Leading us to the next part of this series…