New Ideas for the New Year

Jeffrey A. Carver is the author of numerous science fiction novels and stories, including the Nebula-nominated Eternity's End, Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries novelization, and the hard-SF series The Chaos Chronicles. Jeff also teaches writing in settings ranging from MIT to conferences for young writers, and he's dropped in today to talk about one of the thorniest challenges faced by many aspiring writers.

New year! New ideas! Where do you get your ideas? That's the question most asked of every science fiction writer I know. It's a good question, I suppose, though the answer is simple: everywhere, everything I read, everyone I talk to, everything I see on the internet or watch on TV, everything that filters into my brain is a potential story idea. I'm up to my ears in ideas! The real question is, how do you turn an idea—which can be anything, even a simple concept or image—into a story, which is a sequence of events, one arising from another, in which believable characters grow and change?

Here’s a simple idea that is not a story: The king dies, and the queen dies.

Yes, things happen, but there's no motivation cause or reason, nothing to care about. Here's that same idea, turned into the nucleus of a possible story: The king dies of a mortal wound, and the queen dies of sorrow. How much character, how much cause and effect, is embedded in that one sentence?