Fiction Writing: How to Capture Your BIG IDEA

I do most of my thinking at night. My mind is like a highway, with one thought leading to another like endless exits to new locations. The bright lights of oncoming traffic are flickers of ideas. Most of them pass by, barely warranting a casual glance. They flash white, and then fade to dull red in the review mirror.

And then it hits.

The BIG IDEA bears down on me like a huge, rumbling tractor trailer. I feel the adrenaline surging and I’m wide awake. This thought just can’t wait until morning. If I go to sleep now, I might lose it forever.

Many people have great ideas that could soar, but they never get those ideas off the ground. The idea is so big that it’s frightening or overwhelming. Sometimes the main idea gets lost in the flurry of smaller ideas whirling around as the tractor trailer swooshes by.

Have you ever felt like this? Maybe you were watching a movie or reading a book when your BIG IDEA came along. Now that you have it, what should you do with it?

I don’t wait. I get up and rush down the dark hall to the office. The yellow legal pad and pen are waiting for just such occasions. Bleary-eyed, I scrawl out the BIG IDEA in chicken scratch.

Will I be able to read the writing come daybreak? Hopefully. Sometimes I look at my notes the next morning and wonder what alien left that foreign lettering. But the important thing is that I wrote my idea down. I’ve captured it.

What’s the Point?

The best part of beginning a new creative project comes with laying down the framework of the BIG IDEA. It’s exciting to think of settings and scenes or explore brand-new characters.

But a bunch of scenes and a jumbled list of character concepts don’t make a novel. Your novel needs direction. How are you going to add focus to this BIG IDEA of yours?

Writing for the sake of writing is fun. Sometimes you can ramble and the novel evolves on its own. At some point, though, you have to decide exactly what your story is about.

Think about what you want to accomplish? Are you making a political statement? Do you want people to think? Are you trying to evoke strong emotional response in your readers? Are you writing to entertain? Even the most humorous novels have a goal.

When is it Happening?

What period does your novel take place in? Is it the era of the wild frontier? Does it take place in a medieval time long ago? Maybe you’re the contemporary type – does your story happen in the here and now?

The time of your story place helps shape many aspects of a novel. The era affects character views and beliefs or the methods they achieve their goals. Whether your novel is a mystery or a romance, the “when” molds events, reactions and conflicts that occur in your characters’ lives.

If you have a specific period in mind, be prepared to do some research in order to make your story believable. Even fantasy and science fiction novels have enough reality in them to make them ring true in the reader’s imagination.

Where are You?

Now that you can imagine when your novel takes place, think of your setting, your stage and its props. Does the whole story occur in a single room in a tenement slum? Do events happen in the sprawling high country of the Colorado Rockies?

If you look around your own environment, you can come up with a million details that help describe your life and personality by the objects you have around you. Your office, your bedroom, your house, and your car all contribute to the perception of how the world sees you and how you see the world.

Even the city or town you live in says something about you.

Become your character. Imagine that person’s life, the objects that surround them. Picture them in your mind. Where do your characters live? What do their homes look like? What places do they frequent?

This is just a start. Your tractor trailer BIG IDEA now has a little more life, doesn’t it? It’s not just aimlessly barreling down the road on some unknown highway in the middle of nowhere.

No, this tractor trailer is going somewhere. It’s hauling something. It has a driver, too…

…and that driver is you.

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