by Dave Haslett
To help you get started, I’ve included two hundred “what ifs” in the bonus section at the back of the book. And you’ll find plenty more in my companion book The Fastest Way to Get Ideas:4,400 Essential What Ifs for Writers.
Wishes
Make a list of all the things you wish were true: money grew on trees, children (and ears) had volume controls, you could eat as much food as you wanted to without gaining weight, and so on. Once you get started, you’ll probably find it hard to stop!
Now think of all the stories you could write where these things actually happen. The fun part is thinking about how each wish might turn bad. Why might things not go as well as the characters hoped? How can they be put right afterwards? And what might happen if they can’t be put right?
Worst-case scenario
If you’re planning a story but you have no idea what should happen next, here’s a simple way to proceed: think about the worst thing that could possibly happen at that point.
But don’t just pick the first thing that comes into your head. Make a list of at least ten possibilities, then pick one of these:
the best one
the most intriguing one
the one that would cause your characters the greatest setback
the one that’s closest to your story’s theme
the one that logically connects with something that happened earlier in the story
If you can’t think of anything from earlier in the story that would connect to this event, consider going back and adding something.
Write something
I often find that once I start writing, new ideas just come to me. They’re usually connected with whatever I’m writing about: better ways of saying things; extra topics or scenes to include; other possibilities to consider; ideas for follow-up books, sequels, articles, blog posts, and so on.
Each new idea usually builds upon the section of the book that I’m currently writing and those I’ve already written. Occasionally, the ideas relate to something else, such as a book on a different subject.
If you haven’t written anything yet, there’s nothing for your ideas to build upon, so you’re less likely to have any new ideas. Thinking about writing will only get you so far. To be a real writer you need to actually write something. (I hope that doesn’t come as too much of a shock!)
Your city, town or village
Pick three businesses or organisations from your area and see if you can come up with an imaginary connection between them.
Could there be a criminal connection?
Could the same person or family own them – maybe brothers or cousins?
Perhaps they’re all part of a larger parent company, or they’re the subject of a take-over bid.
Are they run by a bunch of cowboys?
Are they legitimate companies or part of a scam?
Could they be a front for a criminal or terrorist organisation involved in drug-smuggling, money-laundering, or arms trading?
Perhaps they aren’t real companies at all, but fake ones set up by a TV company that wants to show how gullible people are.
Perhaps they’re run by vicious rivals who poach each other’s customers and best employees and use outrageous marketing tricks. What else might they get up to?
There’s plenty of scope here for crime stories, legal or business thrillers, comedies, and even romances.
A similar idea would be to pick three prominent local people and invent a connection between them. They’re probably up to no good – but what are they planning? (Don’t use their real names, of course.)
Your job
No matter how mundane your job is, you must have had a few “odd” days. Try to recall the strangest, funniest, or most embarrassing things that have happened at work.
If you can’t think of anything, ask your friends, family and colleagues about their jobs. It’s best to do this when you’re together as a group, as one person’s recollections will spark other people’s memories of even more bizarre incidents: the delivery driver who forgot about the low bridge, the customer who refused to leave, the manager who got locked in, and many more. Put some of these into your stories. Or you could make up some bizarre incidents of your own, based on the real ones.
Your life
Wherever you live, whatever you’ve done, whatever your job and circumstances, your particular combination of life experiences is unique. Make a list of all the things you’ve done, the things that have happened to you, the places you’ve been, the jobs you’ve had, and so on.
Is there anything on your list that you could write about? How about a non-fiction book about your hobby, or an unusual or severe problem you overcame – or failed to overcome?
Never dismiss an idea
Most people have lots of ideas, but they dismiss them as “my silly little thoughts” or games their minds play. They smile to themselves and then forget all about them. Perhaps they tell their friends their “funny stories”, but do nothing more with them. If you ask them if they’ve ever thought about writing a book, they’ll say they don’t have any ideas for one.
A real writer records these “silly little thoughts” and tries to find ways of using as many of them as possible. They’ll need refining and adapting, and some might never get used, but that’s fine.
Many more people could become writers if they stopped thinking of themselves as “someone who has silly little thoughts” and thought of themselves as “someone who has lots of ideas”. But they’d have to write them down too, of course.
Let your idea mature
Having found your great idea, you might be tempted to start writing your book immediately. Please don’t.
Write down your idea if you haven’t already done so. And maybe add a few notes about some of the ways you think you could develop it into a book – though it doesn’t matter if you don’t have any thoughts on this yet. Then leave your idea alone for a while. It needs time to grow and mature. It might only take a few hours or a few days, but it often takes longer – sometimes months or years.
You’ll know when it’s time to move on to the next stage – planning, outlining and writing – because your brain will tell you to get on with your book, and you’ll feel guilty if you don’t.
By the time that happens, the whole book should be reasonably well formed in your head, and getting it down on paper should be relatively easy.
The next step
You should now have some sort of starting point for your book. All you need is a rough idea at this stage, even if it’s just a single word.
In the next chapter we’ll look at some fast and easy ways of expanding your idea. We’ll also discover how much you already know about the subject, and find out how much research you’ll need to do.
5. What you already know
Now that you’ve found your idea, we need to find out how much you already know about the story or subject. Then we’ll look at some ways of expanding it into enough material to fill a book.
Narrow your topic (and then expand it)
Is your idea too big for one book? If you’ve chosen to write about “history”, for example, that’s much too big a subject to cover in a single book. It would be better to choose a specific period in history, or write about the history of a particular country. Even that could be too much for one book though; you might need to narrow it down further, and perhaps cover a specific aspect of life during that period, such as developments in transportation, trade, agriculture or medicine.
Narrowing your subject like this will speed up the research process. In fact, you probably know quite a bit about the subject already. It’s all in your head somewhere, and the more you can retrieve and write down at this stage, the less you’ll have to research later – and the sooner you can start writing your book.
Another advantage of narrowing your subject into specific topics is that you can easily turn your initial idea into a whole series of books.
The book you might have been planning to write about a sp
ecific period in history could be turned into a dozen or more titles, with each one covering a single aspect of life during that period: rich versus poor, international trade, transportation, education, healthcare, systems of government, law and order, agriculture and food production, foreign relations, warfare, technological progress, customs and pastimes, entertainment, and so on.
You should be able to come up with plenty of other aspects and expand the series further. As readers buy them – and hopefully fall in love with them – and they discover there are more books in the series, each book will serve as a marketing tool for the others.
Let’s look at some simple techniques that will help you discover what you already know about your initial idea. You only need to pick one or two of these, so have a read through them first and see which ones appeal to you the most.
Freewriting
Set an alarm or timer to go off in one hour. Then let your mind relax. Spend a minute or so concentrating on your idea for your book. Then let your thoughts flow freely. Start writing as soon as you feel ready. But once you’ve started, you can’t stop until the hour is up.
Start by listing the main topics or key events, and see if any others come to mind. Then go back to each one and flesh out the details. Write about absolutely anything that comes to mind. Don’t stop to correct your mistakes, and don’t delete anything if you change your mind and decide it’s no good. Either leave it alone, or write yourself a note to explain your decision and say where you’d like it to go instead.
You might like to imagine you’re sitting an exam. You have just one hour to remember everything you know about the subject and put it into some sort of order, with a proper beginning, middle and end.
If you tend to go to pieces under pressure, just relax and list the thoughts that come to mind. Don’t worry about the time or the structure.
Turn the alarm off if you find it too inhibiting. Take as long as you like, but try not to stop writing for a single moment.
Once you get going, you’ll probably realise you know far more about the story or subject than you thought. In fact, getting it all down in an hour will be practically impossible.
Jot down all the main points and headings that occur to you, and leave yourself notes about other details and areas you can explore in more depth later. Write quickly and try to capture everything.
If your mind goes blank, don’t worry. You haven’t run out of things to say, it’s just that you can’t access those thoughts and memories at the moment. Keep writing the last word you wrote, repeating it over and over again. Your conscious mind will soon get bored of this and hand over to your subconscious mind. And your subconscious mind knows exactly what you need and where to find it. It will retrieve tons of information from deep within your memory, and you’ll be off and running again.
When the hour is up, stop writing and read through what you’ve written. I’m sure you’ll be surprised and impressed at how much there is.
If you’re “in the zone” and want to keep writing when the time is up, feel free to carry on!
You now have the beginnings of your book. It’s probably a jumbled mess right now, but we’ll sort that out later.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming, like freewriting, is all about letting your mind run free. Think about your idea, and write down every thought that occurs to you, but this time write it in the form of a list or a set of bullet points.
Don’t reject or correct anything, even if it sounds stupid or wrong. Silly ideas often trigger other ideas that aren’t so silly. Some of your best ideas will probably be inspired by those you nearly rejected.
Your aim here is to produce a long list of random thoughts, ideas, facts, memories, possibilities, phrases, notes, jokes, song lyrics, images, dreams, connections, people, doodles, headings, book and magazine titles, and so on, all connected to the subject or idea of your book. As you think of one thing, it should inspire something else. So add that to your list too, even if it doesn’t seem relevant.
A brainstorming session can be as long as you like, from five minutes to two hours or more. It depends on you, the subject matter, and the amount of time you have available. If you haven’t tried brainstorming before, try a twenty-minute session to see how you get on. Some people recommend a one-hour session, but I think that’s too long if you’ve never done it before.
Don’t stick to the clock too rigidly though. If the session goes well and the ideas come thick and fast, then keep going. On the other hand, if the ideas dry up before the end of the session, then call a halt to it.
As we saw above, if the ideas run out, you haven’t necessarily reached the limit of your knowledge; you’ve simply reached the limit of what your brain is prepared to retrieve during this particular session. Have a break and try again, or try one of the other techniques in this chapter. Even if you think you’ve failed, you may have written down enough ideas and information to begin planning your book. We’ll look at the fastest ways to fill the gaps in your knowledge in the next chapter.
Most how-to books recommend putting your list away for a few days at this point so you can come back and evaluate it with a fresh eye. That’s all very well, but we’re aiming to write our book in a month and we haven’t got time for that. If you held your brainstorming session in the morning, take a leisurely lunch and evaluate your ideas in the afternoon. If your brainstorming session was in the afternoon or evening, have a good night’s sleep and evaluate them the next morning.
We’ll look at how to evaluate your ideas at the end of this chapter.
Mini brainstorm
For a non-fiction book, you need to list everything you can think of about the subject, ensuring that every aspect is covered. You can put together a list of topics by going through the chapter titles and sub-headings in other books. It’s best to use several different books if you can – and every other source you can think of.
Wikipedia is a good place to start. It’s also worth visiting websites and Facebook groups related to the subject, and referring to their how-to guides, tutorials, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages if they have them.
There’s no need to buy any books at this stage. Use Amazon’s Look Inside feature to see the tables of contents of books you’re interested in. Just click on the book’s cover image on Amazon’s website. Each book usually opens at the beginning of Chapter 1, so you’ll probably need to scroll up to see the table of contents.
Once you have your list of topics, hold a mini brainstorming session where you try to explain each topic in your own words. If your topics are too large to do that easily, break them down into smaller sub-topics that you definitely want to cover in your book. Similarly, if your list of topics is really long, mark the ones you definitely want to cover in your book and consider not including the others, or perhaps saving them for your next book.
If you can’t think of anything to write about a particular topic, or you don’t know enough about it, skip it for now and move on to the next one.
You should come to one of the following conclusions about each topic:
You know a great deal about it, so writing about it will be easy.
You know something about it, but there are a few gaps you’ll need to research.
You know little or nothing about it, so you’ll need to do some serious research, consult an expert, work with a co-writer, or leave that topic out.
What you know about the topic seems to be the opposite of what everyone else says, so you’ll need to double-check your facts.
It’s not relevant to the book you’re planning, so it’s safe to leave it out.
Brainstorming your reader
Think about who you’re writing your book for – your ideal reader. It could be a real person, or an amalgamation of several different people.
It definitely helps if your ideal reader is based on one or more real people.
If you don’t know anyone who could represent your ideal reader, try joining a Facebook group related to the
subject of your book. See who’s posting messages and what they’re talking about. It shouldn’t take you long to get a good feel for what they know, their level of experience, how much time and money they dedicate to the subject, the equipment they use, their main problems, what they know and don’t know, what they wish they knew, their ambitions, and so on. Choose one of the group’s members as your ideal reader – but don’t tell him you’ve done so!
Make a list of your ideal reader’s characteristics:
his background and lifestyle
his level of income and spending power in relation to the subject of your book
the amount of time he dedicates to the subject
how much he already knows about it
why he wants to learn more
the level of expertise he’ll have after reading your book
the level of expertise or experience he ultimately wants – and what he’ll do with it
what else he might gain from your book
and so on
The answers you come up with will help you shape your book. You’ll know what to put into it, what to leave out, the level of knowledge or experience to aim for, and so on.