As I look to finish my WIP in the next couple of weeks, my thoughts turn to the process of querying. It is exciting, but daunting. One website I've found that is especially helpful is Query Tracker. It's a great, FREE resource that allows you to organize and track your query letters to possible agents and publishers. The database allows information to be collected and shared, giving you access to useful statistical information about literary agents and publishers. It's also a great procrastination device when you want to just dream a little :)

Query Tracker allows you to:

*Use the database search tools to locate the perfect agent or publisher for your work.
*Organize and Track Your Query Letters.
*Keep track of your query letters using the tracking system available on the web.
*View Statistics about Agents and Publishers.
*Meet other writers who are on the query path, share experiences, and help each other along.

This week we've been talking about where ideas come from. Be sure to check out the great posts made by my fellow Muses. I'd like to share two thoughts on the subject.

Ideas Take Work

An idea is simply a thought. Easy enough to do, right? How hard is it to think? And ideas come quickly, don't they? The very word "idea" summons the cartoon-like light bulb moment.

Maybe that's the case for some people. They come up with an idea for a bestseller as they are brushing their teeth or waiting in line at Starbucks. I've had a few great light bulb moments myself. More often, though, ideas build slowly for me. I pick at them. Break them down. Build them up. I take the detours and turns Donna described. I ask a thousand What ifs like Katy. And then, as Talia shared, I evaluate to be sure it's the right idea for now.

My point is that ideas take work. So don't worry if brilliant ideas aren't just magically popping into your mind. That could happen. It would be great. But you can go find those ideas. So roll up your sleeves and open your eyes to the world.

Novels Are Made of Millions of Light Bulbs

Before I began to write seriously, I remember thinking about novelists, "How in the heck do they come up with all of that?"

Because the thing is, books are complex. When you stop to think about plot, character, setting, theme... ok, let's not think about it too much. Point is, novelists need to conjure up an enormous number of ideas. Books are not built in one light bulb moment, though they may begin that way. Building a novel means day after day after day of sitting yourself down and making yourself think. It's fumbling through the dark for the lamp and finding that light bulb after you've stubbed your toe along the way.

There are days that feel overwhelming. There are days that feel uninspired. It doesn't matter. Those days don't really count. What count are the days that you do find that next idea. That's how we build as writers, one piece at a time. One idea after another. The task needs to be respected. Take it easy on yourself when it's just now flowing. We are creative thinkers, yes, but we are not idea factories.

So be hungry in your quest for ideas but be patient, too.

That concludes my thoughts on thoughts.

I leave you with a new picture of Ivan.

Ideas. 

I would love to know where they come from.  Especially the high concept, completely original, commercial ideas.  Let me know if you figure it out will you?

Just as the process for every book I tackle seems to be different, so is the process for coming up with the ideas that led to the books.  Like all writers, I’m influenced by everything I see and hear: news stories, books, television shows, movies, overheard conversations, personal experiences and even (yes, I’ll admit it) trends.  I think I find ideas through a combination of Donna’s GPS method and Katy’s “what if” imagination, so I won’t bore you with a rehash of what they’ve already said so well.  Instead, I’d like to focus on how to choose an idea from the several shiny ones that vie for your attention.

For me, before I can commit the time and energy to write a novel, there has to be something more than a great idea. There has to be a strong emotion behind it, something that makes me feel like I have to write this book.  That’s the real challenge.  

So here are some things to keep in mind when settling on a shiny new idea:

Consider Timing

What’s this?  I thought I was supposed to write about what I love and eschew trends.  Do I really need to consider market timing at the idea stage?  Talk about a creative downer.  But when vetting your idea, you should think about whether this book could be considered part of a wider trend, and if so, whether that trend will still be around when your book is done six months or a year from now.  By the time a trend is identifiable, it’s usually at its peak and may even be waning.  If you’re reading a lot of books in this genre now, editors are probably just about done buying them.  Maybe you have a unique spin on a trend that is truly genre-busting.  Maybe this is the book you have to write.  I’m not saying not to write it- just that timing and trends should be part of the consideration that goes into your analysis.  I have 40 pages of a purgatory/redemption/angel story I love, that is on permanent hiatus because the market is already pretty saturated with these types of stories.  I’ll probably finish it someday, but not this year.  The timing’s not quite right and I found another shiny new idea that might be better in terms of timing.

The Heart of the Matter

Does this idea speak to your heart?  Can you find the emotional truth in the story?  Does it fill you with passion? This is a very good sign.  If you can connect to the emotional base of the story, you are more likely to stay with it through the entire first draft and all the revisions that come after it.  If you don’t love your story, you can’t expect your readers to.  Finding that emotional connection with a story is a little like falling in love.  Spend some time with your concept, play with your characters.  Make sure that what you’re writing isn’t just a passing fancy.  My brilliant agent Sarah says that every writer needs to know what their book is about.  Not the plot or character, but the theme that resonates with the writer (and hopefully the reader).  Find that emotional heart in your story and let it guide you.

To Market, To Market

Know the genre you’re writing in.  Research comparable titles.  Don’t freak out when you find some.  Knowing what’s out there will help you make sure that your story is different enough to find its own way.  Better to know about similar books before you start writing than after you’re done.  The more successful the comparable titles, the more effort you'll have to make to distinguish your own story.  Editors and agents sometimes say they are looking for books like… but they don’t really mean it.  I know that’s a broad overgeneralization.  What I mean is that they don’t want something exactly like another book. They might want something that evokes the same tone, appeals to the same audience, or has similar themes, but its hard to sell books that have already been done, especially if they've been done well.

The Throat Grabber

Is there something about this story that grabs at you and won’t let go?  Do you feel like you have to see how this story plays out?  Like the emotional connection, a connection to the story itself is paramount to keep you going even when you get to the muddled middle act.  When coming up with an idea, I always jump to the end.  I need to know what the end game is, and I have to want to get there.  If I can’t wait to write the climactic scene, the idea is probably a keeper.  I just read an interview with Stephen King where he talked about his ideas.  He was asked if he kept a folder full of ideas for future stories or books.  He said he didn’t, because if he forgot an idea, it probably wasn’t a good one.  Instead, he focuses on the idea that takes root and won’t let go.  The one he can’t forget.  Those are the ideas that demand to be written.

A Star is Born

Who is your story about?  Do you like him or her?  Why is this the only character who can tell this story? My main characters will usually come to me early in the idea process.   For SPIES, I started with the idea of a teenage private investigator, an idea that sprang from the summer I worked for my dad’s P.I. business before going to law school. The main character, Berry Fields, was fully formed almost from the beginning.  I knew that a girl who spent her time spying on cheating husbands was going to have some issues with guys and relationships.  I also knew that she didn’t have a mother around to keep her from spying on cheating husbands, but I didn’t know why.  One question led to another, and a story was born.  After I wrote the last chapter, I wanted to keep going with the story. I wasn’t ready to leave Berry and I wanted to know what happened to her next.  A strong character can keep you in ideas for a very long time. 

Second Opinions

Don’t be shy about bouncing your ideas off someone.  I’m not suggesting you share your brilliant, high concept idea with the world.  You probably shouldn’t.  My teenage daughter is a great sounding board for ideas. I've also run ideas past my critique group.  And I don’t commit to anything without running the premise by my agent.  She knows the market, and she wants to help me build a career, so why wouldn’t I use that resource?  Find a trusted source to talk about your idea, but be prepared to defend or abandon your idea if it doesn’t get a positive reception.  I’d rather my agent tell me now that she doesn’t think she could sell the book, than after I’ve spent six months to a year writing it.  And for every idea that's rejected, there's usually something just as shiny around the corner.  Better, even.

What things must an idea have before you're willing to commit to it for an entire book or series?  

Have I mentioned that I like history?  Not the dates and facts and battles.  But the characters who enacted it.  It is their stories that inspire me.  But these stories have been told already.  Some of them countless times.  Perhaps where my ideas spring from is not the history itself, but a different way of telling the story that springs from the questions, “What if?” and “Why?”  

I saw Shakespeare’s version of Richard III sometime in the 90’s.  What a fabulously evil, crooked, misshapen inside-and-out character he is.  I fell in love with him (I suppose that makes me twisted, too).  And set out to discover more.

What I discovered was a man devoted to his family and its cause.  A man who stood by his brother who usurped the throne of England by any means he possibly could.  A man who fought in battles more bloody than we can imagine.  A man devastated by the deaths of his wife and son.  A complicated man who took the throne from his nephews for reasons that still remain unclear.  Why?  We don’t know, we can’t know, because he isn’t here to question.  And what if he didn’t have his nephews murdered?  If not, who did?  Or were they murdered at all?  These are questions that beg to be answered in a story – a fiction based on facts, but the whys and what ifs provided entirely by the author.

What about Catherine Howard?  To believe the historians, you would think she is flighty, airheaded, materialistic, promiscuous.  Why?  Because she was a young woman who wore a different dress every day, loved the jewels her husband, Henry VIII, gave her but fell into bed with someone else.  But what if her motivations for all of those things were different?  What if she wasn’t harebrained?  What if she was cunning and manipulative, but overly confident in her own success?

I recently returned from a trip to England, where I caught snippets of stories that brought so many questions to mind. 

Elizabeth Percy, married three times before she was sixteen.  Why?  What did she think about this?  What if she was in love with someone she never married?  What if she never wanted to get married at all?  The possibilities are endless.

Bess of Hardwick – the second most powerful woman in Elizabethan England – hostess to Mary Queen of Scots.  Countess of Shrewsbury.  She came from virtually nothing.  What was her early life like?  Why did she marry four times?  Did she love any of them?  What did she think of Elizabeth?

And Mary Queen of Scots!  Now there is a complicated character.  What if she hated being in France?  What if she hated being in Scotland?  What if she never wanted to be Queen?  What if she dreamed of conquering all of Europe?

What about Catherine Carey, daughter of Mary Boleyn?  And Lettice Knollys, Catherine’s daughter, who stole Queen Elizabeth’s paramour, the Earl of Leicester, right out from under her nose?  What about Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII’s niece, imprisoned twice for daring to fall in love?  What about her granddaughter, Arbella Stuart, who could have been Elizabeth’s heir, had things been different?  What about Jane Grey, the nine days queen?  What about her sisters?

Sometimes, I’m afraid there are more stories than I can write.  After all, I can only handle one at a time – perhaps sprinkling in snippets of the others when they coincide.  Sometimes, I worry that someone else has already told these stories.  And they have.  Many times.  Look at Shakespeare – he covered Richard III and Henry VIII.  How can I compete? 

By offering a different viewpoint.  A different perspective.  A different motivation.  A different voice.  There are no new stories, I’ve heard.  It’s up to us to find a new way to tell them.

The theme for this week's blog is about where we get our ideas. It's probably one of the most frequent questions I'm asked, especially by people who aren't actively engaged in the writing process. I wish there was an easy answer. Like maybe there was this Idea Tree that grew out in the backyard and you could just go pick one when you needed a good, ripe one. (It would grow right next to the Money Tree that my dad was always talking about when I was a kid.) That Idea Tree would have come in so handy when I was writing television scripts for PBS and the pressure to come up with a good idea, in a very short period of time, was intense. I NEEDED one and I NEEDED it by next week. An idea frenzy is never very conducive to actually coming up with something fresh and creative. In fact, it often worked just the opposite. Good ideas tend to run from the smell of desperation.

So what is the magical path to a great idea? I'm not always sure WHERE an idea comes from, but I do know WHEN they tend to arrive. For whatever reason, it's usually when I'm in the car driving somewhere. So if there isn't an Idea Tree, maybe there is an idea GPS that leads in the right direction.

START from HOME: Most, if not all, of my ideas are based somehow in real personal experiences. In Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird she says, "Start with your childhood. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O'Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life." I often start with questions to help me remember:

What was important to me then? Why? What did I love reading at the time? What did I spend my time doing? What did I want most? What did I fear the most?

TURN LEFT at the NEXT LIGHT: Although my ideas are often rooted in reality, there is an important twist that has to occur to make it a story and not a memoir. That usually occurs when I ask myself, "Yes, but what if?" One of my recent manuscripts was inspired by the real story of JonBenet Ramsey, which was in all the newspapers at the time I moved to Colorado. I couldn't quit thinking about JonBenet's brother and how this tradgedy must have effected his life. Later that germ of an idea resulted in a story about a girl who's sister was killed and the guilt she had regarding that event. It wasn't anything like the truth. I had to be willing to turn off the "real" road and take the fictional twisting path to a completely different outcome. Sometimes I've heard a writer say, "but that's not what happened," and the response is "but the real story isn't always the BEST story."

TAKE the ROUNDABOUT: I have this picture book manuscript called Tracey's Always Right. It was the first manuscript I sent out on submission many, many years ago. It's been rejected, critiqued, revised, resubmitted, rejected, critiqued, revised, resubmitted, rejected... (you get the idea). It's gone round and round so many times that now all my writing friends run in horror at the idea of reading and critiquing the newest version of Tracey. Sometimes an idea, as wonderful as it might seem, just doesn't go anywhere.

ENTER the FREEWAY: I'm not a big fan of driving on freeways. Luckily in Colorado where I live, I don't have to very often. There have been times in my writing life that I've felt bombarded with ideas, much like cars whizzing by at 75 miles an hour. The traffic in my brain is piled up and I don't know where to start, so therefore I sit helplessly in the gridlock. I have lots of ideas, but none of them seem like the RIGHT idea. When that happens, sometimes I just cram all of the ideas into one manuscript. The result is a story with too many big ideas. You know what I mean. The one about the vampire with the eating disorder who lives in a steampunk city and can time travel with his werewolf girlfriend into a dystopian future world to defeat the mermaids in the kingdom under the sea? Focus, Donna. I've found the best way to cope with an idea pileup on the freeway is to just jot them down and bank them. They'll be a time when I need them (see below).

STAY on the CURRENT ROAD: When I drive home to Texas from Colorado, there is a stretch of road across West Texas that you can go hours (feels like days) without seeing anything or anyone. It's a strangely beautiful desolation. Sort of like when good story ideas seem few and far between. The chatter in my overactive imagination clears and leaves me with an uncomfortable silence. In times like these, I have to remind myself to keep on the current road --keep opening up the WIP, keep writing in my journal, keep listening, keep reading. I have to trust I will eventually reach civilization again.

YOU HAVE ARRIVED at your DESTINATION: It's all worth it. There is nothing like the feeling of when that idea clicks and I start fleshing it out and changing it into what it will finally become. I know it's a totally new place that I've never been before, yet it was where I was meant to end up all along.