My Journey #3: Brainstorming

I began fleshing out story ideas for my book the old fashioned way – writing by hand using a gel ink pen in a college ruled notebook. I found that handwriting during the brainstorming phase was much more beneficial than typing ideas into Microsoft Word. When I use a word processor, I have the tendency of re-reading, rearranging and editing what I wrote. This is not a very useful thing to do during brainstorming.

The whole purpose behind brainstorming is to go with the flow – do not censor yourself, do not second-guess your ideas – just get them down on paper. You can come back later and go through them to decide which ones are worth keeping and which ones won’t make the final cut.

I had probably scribbled down about 50 notebook pages worth of ideas. When I thought I had enough, I started to formulate the ideas into something more cohesive, making a general timeline of events and describing scenes at a high level. Once I had a better idea of where the story was going, I wrote a short, one-paragraph synopsis of the book, which I will continue to refine as the story takes shape:

A former Special Forces operative turned mercenary, with a mysterious past she can’t remember, is being hunted by deadly otherworldly creatures, the government and an evil mage who she is inexplicably drawn to. She finds allies in this battle who are trying to help her uncover her past, which holds the key to her current situation. But can she trust her allies? Are the bad guys really as evil as they seem? Or is she being played as a pawn in a game bigger than any of them?

At this point in the process I realized I now needed to start really organizing my ideas, and a notebook probably wasn’t going to be the best place to do this. This is the stage that requires fleshing out ideas, which means selecting concepts, editing and ordering the sequence of scenes. I decided to download a software program that would help me in the outlining process. There is nothing wrong with just using Microsoft Word or Excel, but again – anal planner here! So I settled on Scrivener because it was a highly rated program that works on a Mac. It cost me about $45, and so far it has been well worth it.

Scrivener has allowed me to create chapters, scenes within chapters, describe locations within the story and build character bios. You can think of it like writing ideas onto individual index cards. You can then shuffle the index cards around until you build the right sequence of events, adding and removing index cards along the way.

As a first time author, I really found that I needed structure and organization to help minimize the intimidation factor of writing a full-length novel. I’m sure there are plenty of authors out there who can just start writing on a blank page and figure the story out as they go along, but outlining has worked best for me so far.