Where Do New Stories Come From?
My Current Process for Finding and Developing New Ideas
I have been writing stories in various forms for many years: comic strips, comedy sketches, long form plays, short stories, and now comic books. While my success rate may be debatable, I have definitely taken a stab at the craft many times, so a few things about my own process have evolved over time. As I was beginning to start some new stories from scratch, I thought it may be insightful for anyone who is also a writer to track the steps of my process. Like I say process is always evolving, yet despite my own imperfections, sometimes I find it can be helpful to see how someone else is working.
The Story Sentence
For my most recent story, I started with a process I learned in the Intro to Comic Book Writing class I took at Comics Experience. Andy Schmidt, one of our teachers, taught us that every good story can be broken down to one central story sentence: a character, a goal, and how they try to reach their goal. In our class, we were applying this idea to comic book length stories, but he explained you can still apply it to longer, more complex stories, as well. (Example: A farm boy, Luke Skywalker, seeks to save a princess by leaving his desert planet to learn about a mystical power, the Force.)
It sounds too simple to contain more complicated stories like epic novels, for instance, but when writing something new, having a core character, goal, and action helps you build a foundation on the most important elements of the story and weed out all the rest. This is especially helpful when writing something that has limited space and needs to be very economical like a comic.
Where the Ideas Come From
How I develop ideas and keep track of them might be one place where my process differs from other writers. I know a rule of thumb for many writers is to keep a notebook or journal to always write down ideas as they come to you. As they say, if you don’t write it down you will forget it. This is probably good advice.
However, I have never been good at keeping a notebook for ideas. I have tried, but I usually forget to carry it around. And when I do try to keep one, it often just ends up in a drawer, and I forget where it is until years later when I’m about to move somewhere. I’ve probably cheated myself out of many ideas by not developing this habit, but the one thing I have learned as I have gotten older is it is better to adapt to your own personality than to fight against it.
What has worked better for me is to just constantly absorb information I find interesting. Whether it is reading comics, listening to podcasts, or looking at cool art, I try to always be alert for things that get my heart rate going or the gears in my head turning. Sometimes it is an anecdote from a podcast or a picture I see on Instagram. Whatever it is, I store it away in my brain and just let it sit there.
If it is something I don’t find that interesting, I will probably forget about it. But if I do find it worthwhile, it will usually keep popping up in my mind for a long time. That’s how I know there is something worth latching onto—sort of like a quality test. What I don’t do is spend time thinking about a story for the idea. Just having the nugget of an interesting image or strange concept is enough.
Side note: Depending on what I am working on, I do sometimes write down a link to the story or picture in my computer/phone for reference later. Whether I do mostly depends on if I will need facts from the story or if there are particulars I know I will forget. Again, knowing your own brain and how to work with it is the key.
For example, the first short story I wrote to use in my anthology is about a Bigfoot. The inspiration came when I heard a story on a podcast about a guy who said if you play a recording of a baby crying, Bigfoot creatures will come to check on it out of distress.
It was an interesting little story (true or not), but I never wrote it down. I would just think about it from time to time. When I finally did use the idea for a story, the time period changed, and it transformed from using a recording into using a real child as bait. But the core idea I heard launched me into the story, and I could then sculpt it into whatever I found cool or interesting.
Vomiting Up the Ideas Into Story Sentences
For this go around, I just started by making as many interesting story sentences as I could since I am looking for multiple stories for my anthology project. Once I have a list of ideas, I try to boil them down to the two or three I think will work best.
Some of the story sentences may be stinkers that won’t be very useful, and that’s okay. None of them are going to be great works of genius at this stage. That’s not what the story sentences are supposed to be, so don’t beat yourself up if some ideas look dumb on paper. The important thing is that if you have several from which to choose. Probably at least one or two of them will show some potential that will be worth exploring and turning into something cool.
Finding the Emotional Connections
With a story sentence in mind, I start roughing out an idea for the possible details of the story. This phase of writing is all wide open and exploratory. It should not have details like character dialogue or camera shots. (Even though I make this mistake almost every time. And it always slows me down.) This is broad strokes time.
The biggest thing I am looking for at this stage is how to take the hook of the idea—that thing I thought was really cool about the idea floating in my head forever (i.e. drawing out a Bigfoot by manipulating it with a baby crying)—and link it emotionally to my main character.
“What does linking it emotionally mean, Sterling?”
What I am looking for is the main character’s internal or external life struggle. What is going on in the character’s life that they need to either overcome or deal with to become a better person or live a better life.
This may or may not be related to the original goal the character has in the story sentence. Often, the goal a character has at the beginning of the story—the “want”—turns out to be different from what the character needs to learn by the end of the story—the “need”. (This terminology came from a Hello Future Me youtube video I watched. I don’t remember which video, but he deserves credit for such a useful concept.)
The thing that will always draw any reader into any story is, “How does this character relate to me?” The human experience of being alive is one that keeps happening over and over again all the time. There really isn’t a whole lot that has changed about the emotional ups and downs of being born to being dead for thousands of years. So if a character is feeling sad or angry about something, there’s a good chance all of us are familiar with feeling sad or angry about something similar in our own lives—if not the circumstances then at the very least the emotion.
What makes writing the story fun and interesting (at least to me) is overlaying that common emotional experience with the intriguing idea. I like to look for ways that I can make that strange anecdote or image in my head become a sort of symbolism or parallel story to express the character’s more common everyday struggle. Why this is cool or a fun puzzle for me to solve is anyone’s guess. I just know when I do figure it out, I love it, and—more often than not—I learn a little something about myself in the process.
The emotional connection can come in many forms, but most often it comes in the form a relationship to my main character. As far as I am concerned, the whole point of being alive is to make connections with people we care about—older, younger, related, unrelated—and sometimes people we don’t. It is what gives us our deepest joy and causes us our greatest pain. Because of that, if a relationship doesn’t already exist in the story sentence, I will look for one that matters to the main character.
Sometimes as the idea goes through various transformations, I will change the original relationship I came up with to something else. When I was developing the idea for my comic currently in production, The Airship, it originally started about a relationship between a father and daughter. After playing with it for awhile, I found it became much more engaging when it was about two sisters instead. However, the core idea of a mysterious dirigible appearing in the skies remained the same.
Writing the Story Synopsis
Once I have the relationship, the emotional struggle, and the core intriguing idea, I start looking for how I can turn that story into a beginning, middle, and end. This part of the process might be the most difficult for me. My tendency is to want to sort out too many details of the structure while trying to write the rough synopsis. However, you should avoid this tendency. This part should be rough and imperfect.
If (like I often do) you try too hard to get it all in order and fully formed right out of the gate, you run the risk of bogging yourself down on details that may disappear eventually anyway. You also will be tightening up your lucid brain and not allowing it to be open to new discoveries you may make as you are writing. This is the time when I really turn on my improv brain and let ideas pop into my head freely. (For more information, take some improv classes. I recommend them to everyone whether you are a theatre person or not.)
Often I find that in the process of writing the synopsis (sometimes later in the process, too), I may discover that the story is in fact about something completely different from what I thought it was going to be at the start. That is okay. This doesn’t mean you are giving up on your original vision so much as you are discovering a vision that was subconsciously more important for you to express. You might find, for example, what you thought was a story about the dangers of a person relentlessly chasing their obsession is actually a story about finding the meaning of family.
So do everything thing you can to allow your imagination to run wild and let those discoveries happen. Don’t get trapped by any ideas in the early phases. However, don’t ignore ideas that pop up out of nowhere. The ones that may make no sense, but something about them keeps drawing you back. More than likely, that means your subconscious mind is telling you there is something cool there. You just have to keep chipping away at it to find the figure hiding in the marble.
(Enough cliche metaphors for one day? I think so, too.)
There is a point in the next writing phases where structure and committing to certain choices does begin to matter, but I will discuss more how I approach those stages in another post.
For now, I am in this synopsis phase with the story I am writing, and it has already transformed multiple times as I push it around like puddy: change a character here, change a location there, add another scene, etc. It is difficult and frustrating work for me every time I do it, but I find once I have a beginning, middle, and end I like, I cannot wait to see it all come together.
Sterling Martin is an artist and designer living in Chicago, IL. His background includes drawing, writing, theatre, teaching, improv & sketch comedy, and whatever else he can get his hands on to be creative. You can find him on the internet at:
Instagram: @sterfest.art
Website: sterlingmartin.design
Twitter: Maybe someday?
Linkedin: I’m pretty sure I have one of those
Facebook: Ugh, do I have to?