Working Through the Concept - part II
April 26th, 2008 | by smokingpen |Authors will tell you that finding an idea is not the hard part - rather, working through the idea is the hardest part in writing a book or story.
Writing a book is a long, lonely, and arduous task. Some people have the ability to do this process very quickly, Stephen King, T.A. Pratt, Orson Scott Card, and others. However, this is merely the process of writing and not determining whether or not the concept is worth working through.
Getting an idea is relatively simple.
You can get the idea walking down the street. For me, the ideas I am working through started in various ways. Cassandra West came (in part) as a result of reading The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. What that book did was return me to a city I really enjoyed living in in my early twenties, and to show me the opportunities of writing sword and sorcery stories set in the Old West. The concept is relatively easy to come by, though as I (occasionally) work through the various aspects of the stories, I find new things about Cassandra West, the world she lives in, the various towns she deals with, and the people she comes in contact with. One of the coolest additions to the story came, in part, out of a conversation with my wife, named, The Reverend Bubbha Thomas.
However, characters and settings don’t a story make. You have to have a reason for those characters to be in those settings and for everything to work together in a way that allows the final product to be a compelling story. The reason you read a book is in part because you enjoy how the writer tells stories; and in part because you want to see what the author has to say about a particular subject. In many cases, even candy stories, mass market publications (old dime store novels), have something to say about some subject.
Because subject matter is (relatively) important, publishers often deal with specific subject matter. This is called genre. The popular genres are: Science Fiction and Fantasy, Romance, Thriller, Mystery, General Fiction, and more. Each of these subject’s can be divided even further. Sci-Fi and Fantasy are a part of Speculative Fiction. General Fiction also includes Literature as well as Candy Lit.
This is important because, as an author, you will be writing toward a specific audience. That audience will be reading toward a specific theme. And that theme will describe what genre you are writing in. Granted, a Romance can deal with multiple other themes, fantasy, sword and sorcery, and others, but the main theme of the story is romance and love.
Having the theme of the story, what it deals with, helps determine how you will work through the concept.
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