Weekly Discussion Thread [Expanding Ideas]

Kamar

Alright, this is a new idea a few of us in IRC thought up. Basically every Sunday we'll come up with some topic of discussion and talk about it until we run out of things to say or the next Sunday hits, at which point we can spin it off to its own thread if people want to continue discussing it. The subjects could be any aspect of the art and business of writing for any genre or medium.
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This week's subject: We'll kick things off with a bit on expanding ideas. How we take those nuggets of thought we come up with while listening to music or masturbating to llama porn and turn them into stories.



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Personally, I find my ideas grow organically. If it's a cool idea, I'll think about it incessantly, every time I listen to music or have one of those 'Oh man, what if THIS happened at this part instead' moments while reading or watching something. If its an aspect of worldbuilding, or requires aspects of worldbuilding, I'll start thinking about how things have to work for the idea to make sense.

I'll slowly tack on characters and worlds and climaxes, sometimes developed for the idea, sometimes developing independently until I unexpectedly have two separate bits cling together.

Magell

I usually have some basic plot idea in my head, or occasionally a setting and just start writing something so I have a beginning that will lead me to what the story is going to be and then I come up with a couple of big moments and then work on getting things from point to point in a solid convincing way. This lack of foresight and planning causes lots of story starts to die, but I keep the ideas and try them again and again until I manage to make it all come together for a good story.

Kamar

Expanding ideas might have been a bit of a dud. Might need something more contentious next week. In the mean time, mild divergence in sort of the opposite direction. How do you guys decide which ideas to throw away? Obviously you're going to occasionally roll in some muck with all the good stuff. Ever toss em not because you're uninterested in writing them but because you think they might not go over well with your audience? Or take an idea that's bad for the particular story but use it elsewhere?

Personally, I have a bit of trouble with this. Once something is in my head I'm going to get it to work as well as I envisioned it, even if it takes as much brainstorming to get through as the rest of the novel in its entirety. And I take a sort of childish delight in making a portion of my audience uncomfortable, usually with some aspect of a work's romantic subplot, so the self-censoring thing doesn't come up much.