The Home of Forgotten Stories

How do you begin to write a story? What questions do you ask?

Often I tend to start with a MacGuffin, and then add more and more MacGuffins, until eventually I finally have to buckle down and write a character.

For instance, in “Telling of the Story“, the originating idea was “What if there was a race of beings that couldn’t communicate visually or orally?” Which is an interesting idea, but how would they communicate then? And then once I had the method, I had to build a society around it, and then a story, and then the Chief simply became a vehicle for observing the way it played out.

I have another novel on the back burner that began with a sentient character who was trapped inside of a tree. So immediately the questions rain in: is it a human? How does it survive? Does it know where it is? Is the tree sentient too? Why? Does the trapped being communicate with the tree? How did this happen in the first place? I had to answer LOADS of questions before I could finally loop back around and give my character a personality (his name is Jensa, and he is a human of sorts, and the explanation for why he’s in a tree is so complicated that I suspect it’s going to be a trilogy if I can ever get it written).

“Tad the Scrubber” was based upon a prompt about past lives from Reddit. The fact that prompts are such a popular way to inspire stories tells me that MacGuffin-then-characters is pretty common. “Axiom” and “Xperience” were both prompt-inspired as well.

“The Nearly 101 Almost-Deaths of Heinrich 347-A” was written for a contest that asked for the best title and first paragraph of a story. Once I had the first paragraph written, I realized I wanted to know more, so I kept writing.

Writing MacGuffin-first tells me that the question I’m most often concerned with is “Why?” Why are there only moons in the sky? Why is the restaurant so popular? Why does the little dinerbot want to die?

And I don’t ask “Who?” until I’ve figured out my “Why?” Sometimes that can take me months of analysis.

My character generation, on the other hand, is usually pretty haphazard and impulsive. I come up with a very basic concept and just let them loose in the world and see how they behave.

But back when I used to write fanfiction (if you have a very important opinion about people who write fanfiction, I advise you to find some business and go and mind it), obviously I would start with characters I already knew well and loved, and write scenarios for them based upon rather contrived prompts. The pleasure was in fleshing them out into stories that made actual sense; I could explore my “why?” with ease, because no matter what I threw at the characters, I knew exactly how they would respond.

Here’s the rub: when I was writing fanfiction, my work flowed out of me like a gushing river. When I write original fiction, it comes out in a painful trickle.

It has finally occurred to me that I should probably spend more time with my characters before I start writing their stories.

So what question do you focus on first, when you write? Do you first sketch out your characters, or your concepts?