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Tuesday, March 06, 2012

From Idea To Story - Part 1

I thought there might be some interest in running through how a story comes together for me, and since I've just started building a new novella, I can start from the beginning.

The Idea: Saturday Morning Feb 25, 2012

I'm not sure I've ever gotten an idea the same way twice, but this idea came to me via a dream. I've had other ideas come in this way, but I've never written any of the others. This wasn't a paranormal dream--it had a regular human hero and heroine--but I knew the setup wasn't one I wanted to write. At least not as a regular, contemporary romance.

In my dream there was a fairly large age difference involved along with a couple of other elements that didn't appeal to me, and if I'm going to spend the time it's going to take to write a story, I need to like it.

I woke an hour before the alarm went off and spent that time in bed, trying to convert it to my Blood Feud world. The hero fell into place pretty easily--a vampire with a few years under his belt. The heroine proved more difficult. To keep the dynamics from the dream, I thought, maybe she's the daughter of one of the big shots in the vampire hunters, but I'm not a huge fan of human/paranormal creature pairings. I've written them because that's what the characters told me they were, but I much prefer matching power with power.


Idea Discussion: Saturday Night, Feb 25, 2012

A friend and I were already slated to chat via instant messaging, but this wasn't on the agenda. Still, she wrote an entire book based on one of her dreams, so of course, I shared mine and mentioned that I didn't like having a human heroine, but I wasn't sure how else to work it. It's while we were brainstorming that she mentioned something that will work perfectly, make the heroine paranormal, and keep the original dynamic of the dream.

We also discussed the bad guy because you know I'm going to have one of those. This took more back and forth before we hit on an idea that worked.