Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Deciding What to Write

Interesting advice, but nothing like my process. 

My primary ways of deciding what to write are:

1) The story is burning a hole in my brain.  The characters won't shut up.  I write it down, problem solved.

2) Somebody asks for it.  This can be offering me money to write something specific, or giving me prompts in a poetry fishbowl, or saying they want more of a particular series, or writer's guidelines, etc.  

My secondary ways of deciding what to write include:

3) I spot a gap.  Somebody complains that there is no X or the X written all sucks, or I notice there is not much X and hey I have an idea for that bubbling around in my brain.

4) Something pisses me off.  I go into a bookstore and there's a big pile of suck all the same, so I want to write a counterpoint to that.  Someone is wrong on the internet or an asshole on television, and I want to write a fix-it to their fuck-up.

5) A random article or other resource snags my attention.  I think, hey, somebody should write a story about that.  Well, I'm somebody.
Tags: how to, reading, writing
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  • 2 comments
fayanora

fayanora

November 12 2013, 04:29:04 UTC 7 years ago

A lot of my story ideas are from random things my brain comes out with. Like one idea was from my brain thinking "what if AIs forgot they were artificial because their makers die out?" which led to a story about an AI equivalent of Darwin and evolution.
lb_lee

lb_lee

November 12 2013, 04:36:26 UTC 7 years ago

I tend to decide my methods the way you do. I tend not to feel bad about "wasting time," the way the article writer is. Every failure, I get something out of--some of my writeathon serials are cannibalized from old high school stories!

Then again, I'm usually working on multiple stories at a time, so probably just have a different modus operandi than this guy.

--Rogan