Never Say You Can’t Survive: Don’t Be Afraid to Go on Lots of First Dates With Story Ideas – tor.com

Charlie Jane Anders is writing a nonfiction bookand Tor.com is publishing it as she does so.Never Say You Cant Surviveis a how-to book about the storytelling craft, but its also full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish in the present emergency.

Below is the fifth chapter, Dont Be Afraid to Go on Lots of First Dates With Story Ideas, which begins section2, Whats A Story, and How Do You Find One?you can findall previous chapters here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!

One of the biggest sources of shame and anxiety for writers, especially newer writers, is the failure to finish a story. What if you start a dozen stories, and never quite find your way to the end of them? This might seem like a lack of follow-through, and even a reason to beat yourself up.

But maybe dont think of it as failing to complete something. Instead, try thinking of it as going on a bunch of blind datesthat dont happen to lead to second dates. No harm, no foul.

Its easy to get infatuated with a brand-new story idea. Check out that sexy elevator pitch, and all of those dazzling implications. This story idea is both rich and beautiful, and you want to get to know it a lot better. But then you spend a little more time together, andthe chemistry just isnt there. Turns out that elevator pitch only lasted a few floors, and all the cool little notions that came with it just arent panning out.

So just like with all the attractive singles in your area who are on every dating app ever, you might need to have one glass of merlot at a lot of wine bars before you find the premise youre ready to hang with.

Theres no shame whatsoever in writing five sentences (or five pages) of a story before deciding that its not going to click after allyoull know youve found the one when it keeps popping into your head, and you keep thinking of more places you could go with it. Plus, sometimes youll come back to one of those stories you started, and suddenly have a great idea of how to finish it. Ive put plenty of half-finished stories aside, only to come back years later and find my way to the end of them.

Im a stubborn cuss, so I have a hard time admitting that something isnt working and its time to try something else. I used to try and force myself to keep going.

But lately, Ive been realizing that I havent actually gotten any better at finishing the stories I start. Instead, Ive just gotten quicker to realize that somethings not panning out, and its time to jump tracks. When I was putting together my upcoming short story collection, I went back and looked through all the stories I wrote when I was starting outand somehow, I had forgotten that for every story I finished, there were five or six that I didnt. And I found tons of notes and other evidence of me banging my head against the same wall over and over.

I had to learn to stop thinking of leaving a story unfinished as an admission of defeat, or thinking that it reflected on me as a writer. I had to give myself permission to move on.

Of course, sometimes theres a story idea that I know in my bones is meant for me, and worth the effort, and I keep getting pulled back to it even though I cant bring it to life. That definitely happens on a regular basis, and well talk in later chapters about how to deal with getting stuck when a story is both compelling and not working. But most of the time, Ive found putting a story on the back burner is the right choicemy subconscious can keep poking at it, while I do other stuff. (And if I stop thinking about it at all, theres a sign that it was not meant to be.)

Another important lesson I had to learn: theres never any shortage of story ideas. Theyre easy to come by, and theres no need for a mentality of scarcity. If you can start thinking of story ideas as abundant, leaving stories unfinished will feel a lot less wasteful, and more like writing exercises, or good practice.

To return to the dating metaphor, you dont just want to find a story ideayou want to find the story idea that youre going to want to commit to. And there really are plenty of fish in the sea.

Part of the mystique of writing is that story ideas feel kind of magical and miraculous. Were all used to falling in love with books based on the two sentences on the back cover, and the right idea, in the right hands, can feel electrifying. Its easy to believe that ideas are the key ingredient of great storytelling, and hard to accept that ideas are easy to come by.

But once you realize that ideas are an endlessly renewable resource, then you can be more relaxed about trying out lots of them. And maybe this knowledge will also make it easier for you to come up with more of them. Instead of being precious about any one idea, you can just keep brainstorming endlessly until you have a bunch that you like.

The universe contains a billion layers of miracles, outrages, and strange phenomena, and if everybody on Earth wrote one story per day for the next hundred years, wed barely tap a tiny fraction of that potential. Every random subgenre and plot device has a limitless number of stories that have never been writtenlike a playground that goes on and on forever. Every issue of New Scientist contains a ton of science fiction story ideas, and you can get tons of ideas from just taking a walk and people-watching (dont be creepy). Or just try to imagine one thing in the world changing drastically, or the weirdest thing that could happen to someone. Or get into a fight with a dead author.

Lately Ive been speaking to high-school classes, and I have an exercise that I like to take the students through. I get people to come up with random items or concepts, like potato! or umbrella! or running late! We pick one of those, like potato!, and then we spend a few minutes coming up with twenty things that could happen to a potato. Maybe the potato gets married. Maybe it grows legs and learns to walk. Maybe the potato runs for president.

Thats just the start of the exercise. After that, we try to come up with a protagonist for the story. Is it the potato itself? Or the person who gets married to the potato? Or the potato farmer? We try to come up with a central conflict of the storylike, maybe someone has religious objections to potato marriage. And hopefully, we come up with possible complications, or unexpected turns the story could take. At the end of five to ten minutes, weve usually come up with 100 or so story ideas.

Part of the fun of writing science fiction and fantasy is that there are almost no limits. If youre writing a murder mystery, you pretty much start out with the idea that someone is getting murdered, and the murderer will (probably) get caught. If youre writing a romance, two or more people are probably going to fall in love. SF and fantasy contain hundreds of subgenres, in which certain things are probably inevitable, like a steampunk story probably needs to have some steam someplace. But still, when you start writing a piece of speculative fiction, that blank page can turn into almost anything you want to do.

Sometimes, a good story can start with a what if, like what if vampires really craved wizard blood? Or a character who just feels really compelling, whom you want to follow around, as we talked about previously. Or you can start building a world that you want to tell stories in. Or a particular setting that seems rich, like an old church or a generation ship. You could even start out with one particular scene that just needs to happen, and then the story grows around that one scene.

Thats the great thing about stories. Any part of the puzzle can be the first piece. (But just like with any puzzle, you cant move forward until you find the connections between the different pieces.)

Story ideas arent just a never-ending bounty, theyre also free in the sense that nobody can own them. And if a thousand writers all tackled the exact same idea at the same time, youd end up with a thousand totally different storiesbecause what really matters, the hard part, is turning a premise into a story.

Like, take our vampires who crave wizard blood. You could tell the story of a wizard whos on the run from hungry vampires. Or a vampire whos forced to drink the blood of a wizard who healed her mother. You could tell the story of the last remaining wizards on Earth, and their final desperate stand against the vampire army. Or the reluctant vampire-wizard alliance against their common enemy, the anemia pixies.

The premise can go in any number of directions, and until you pick one of those directions, you dont really have anything. That process of turning a neato idea into a proper, full-fledged story isnt just about choosing a path forwardits about everything from compelling characters, to lived-in worldbuilding, to the hundreds of tiny details that turn a sterile idea-particle into a living, blooming, pollenating garden.

Put another way, centaur bounty hunters is a premise. Centaur bounty hunters in love is a story. Centaur bounty hunters in love, but only one of them wants to capture the naiad alive is an idea with legs. (No pun intended.)

So how can you tell if a story idea is worth your valuable time and attention? By trying to make it work and seeing what happens. Theres no diagnostic that works as well as just trying to do the thing, and seeing if itll happenand being okay with deciding at some point that its not happening with this particular premise.

For me personally, Ive often found that the more intriguing an idea is on the surface, the less likely it is to work for me. My hard drive is full of neat ideas that would make my ears prick up if I heard that someone else had written thembut theyre just not going anywhere interesting for me. Often, the ideas that seem more basic seem to give me the opportunity to find my own random spin on them, and the cleverest, smartest ideas seem to peter out the fastest for me. (As always, your experience may be different.)

Ive started to think that something about the process of grappling with a concept, shaking it down until something interesting rolls out, is essential to my creative investment.

Maybe this is because the ideas that are coolest on the surface are also the ones that have the most clear-cut implications. Whereas, if its not immediately obvious who should be the protagonist, or how the conflict should play out, then I get more intrigued and want to keep poking at it. Plus if Im absolutely sure about whats going on in a story, before I even start writing, then Im not going to be as fired upbecause to me, part of the joy of writing is finding out whats really happening, and whats really at stake. (Well be talking a lot more about this soon.)

To return to the dating metaphor, you start trying to get to know a potential story from the first moment you meet. And just like in dating, its impossible to separate those two processes: learning more, and figuring out if this is going to work or not. Your storytelling gears start turning, even as you try to see if this is the right match, and the two things feed on each other. Is this a short story, a novella, a novelor maybe just a piece of flash fiction? Is this something thats going to keep surprising and intriguing you, or is it going to feel predictable and like youre going through the motions?

I dont want to run that metaphor into the groundbut getting drawn into creating a story really is a lot like falling in love. Frustrating, anxiety-provoking, confusing, a cauldron of pure miseryand also, the best and most fulfilling thing ever. So often, writing advice is all about mastery and craft, the idea of imposing your will on a lump of unformed narrative. But my happiest writing times are usually when Im seducing a story, and being seduced in turn.

And just like love, youll know it when you see it. The best story idea isnt the shiniest or most brilliant-soundingits the one that keeps you obsessing and questioning and rethinking and wondering and excited to keep trying to make sense of all the chaos. Love is patience, but love is also having the courage to ask for everything you need, and not settle for less. You can tell when a story was written with love, versus when someone did their duty.

The only difference between love affairs and story-writing? You probably cant put a potential romance on ice for a year or twelve and be certain that your date will still be excited to see you whenever youre ready to come back.

Charlie Jane Anders latest novel isThe City in the Middle of the Night. Shes also the author ofAll the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, andChoir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Plus a novella calledRock Manning Goes For Brokeand a short story collection calledSix Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com,Boston Review,Tin House,Conjunctions,The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,Wiredmagazine,Slate,Asimovs Science Fiction,Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA,Catamaran Literary Review,McSweeneys Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story Six Months, Three Dayswon a Hugo Award, and her story Dont Press Charges And I Wont Sue won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. Charlie Jane also organizes the monthlyWriters With Drinks reading series, and co-hosts the podcastOur Opinions Are Correctwith Annalee Newitz. She is writing a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, to debut in early 2021.

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Never Say You Can't Survive: Don't Be Afraid to Go on Lots of First Dates With Story Ideas - tor.com

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero