- A judge in a famous contest, a publisher tells you so. Yeepee! People want to know more when you give them the elevator pitch. Send your idea around and see if people get excited by it. Would they read the story? Would they buy the book? There are contest/forums that test ideas, so submit to yours to them.
- Your CPs cannot stop thinking about your story, even if their comments can seem negative. Especially if their comments are overtly negative. A good story is supposed to haunt people, crush them in the deepest part of their soul, make them want to yell at you for writing it, puzzle them, or you really can’t shake out how uncomfortable it makes you feel. If your story creates emotions in people, it's probably a winner.
- An idea is haunting you and you have spent years thinking about it. You have researched aspects of it without getting anywhere, still you have come back to it. Be patient, the idea is making its way in your mind and will come out fleshed out when you’re ready. Ideas start as embryos. Ideas get their wings when you are able to associate other ideas to them and these other ideas are conflicting. Yes, ideas are the result of conflicting/bothering/mind blogging thoughts. At first, they can be hard to handle like red hot charcoal, but with time they can make a victorious comeback. Who said looking at ideas from a different perspective is easy and quick? Jean Auel started writing her series at 40 years old; 35 years later, she’s writing the last book in the series. From an amateur anthropologist, she has become an expert in her field. That’s devotion.
- You dig as deep as you can and decide to be perfectly honest. Some actor once said that in order to act you need to lose the sense of who you are. Actors wear so many personalities; it’s hard to find yourself once you’ve believed you were someone else for months on end. Same for writers. Actors actually end up in therapy after playing their best roles. There is no reason why writers wouldn’t have to do the same. If you cannot personally connect with the character, no matter how good the idea is, the result will be average. It’s your personality that will dig the story deeper and deeper to the limits of what’s humanly imaginable. Honesty is everything.
- You reached many dead ends and got side-tracked. Go through an actor training, workshops, thousands of books. Try out all the ideas. Writing is hard work. You will reach many dead ends. Discover how much there is beyond your idea that you didn’t even know existed. Yes, really. Jean M. Auel is an American writer who wrote the Earth’s Children series, novels set in prehistoric Europe. She confesses, “I started out with an idea for a story of a young woman who was living with people who were different. And I wanted something substantial.” “I’ve read an awful lot of -ology books, climatology, speleology. I came up with the idea. But the real fun and the real excitement came when I got into the research and discovered how much was there that we didn’t know. So I decided I wanted to tell it, in a way that was understandable to most people. So that’s fiction.” https://earthsky.org/human-world/jean-auel-on-painted-caves-and-her-latest-novel
- One idea must uncover themes you would never have associated with the idea. Explore many themes. You are ready to go as far as your story will lead you and feel as many feelings as you can. Jean Auel has taken as many workshops as she could. She has visited as many caves as she could and she has cried because she felt overwhelmed by these places. She has learned about all the subjects she could think about or stumbled about like “markings on horses' teeth, prehistoric attitudes towards disability, and arguing competitions in the Arctic.” https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/jean-m-auelwhat-prehistoric-attitudes-towards-sex-2254057.html A great idea is an adventure in a world that goes beyond what we ever expected to discover. It leads the writer to the far end of the world of possibilities.
- You have a list of the most common ideas and make sure your idea doesn’t belong there. Become aware of what has been overdone. If you go for the Cinderella story (rags to riches), make sure your Cinderella isn’t anything like anyone’s Cinderella. Make it a Phoenix.
- You make sure you have a unique take or perspective on the subject. Think about who is your main actor. Is your main actor someone you will think about first or someone no one will think about? Did you research unique takes on history or experiences from autobiographies? Did you make a list on all the possibilities and crossed out the first 20? Are you inspired to take huge leaps of faith on this idea? Think the unthinkable. Jean Auel came up with her own take on crime and punishment in prehistoric ties, “A question about Cro-Magnon crime and punishment inspires a ghoulish tale of an Eskimo found guilty of selfishness: the miscreant stole strips of meat from his tribe's store of liver; the tribe's solution was to swap their usual liver with cuts from a polar bear. Because polar bears are so carnivorous, their livers are rich enough in vitamin A to be poisonous. "That was the tribe's way of dealing with a selfish man. If I could have used that directly, I would have," Auel adds rather wistfully.” (https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/jean-m-auelwhat-prehistoric-attitudes-towards-sex-2254057.html)
- Can readers connect to what you are writing? In other words, is the main theme something people can relate to, even if their experience is not as dramatic or extreme as the experience of your character? Can the readers say they feel for the main character? Even if your main character is an anti-hero, he or she has redeemable qualities that most people can relate to. Is your character a beggar that happens to save cats? No everyone can relate to being a beggar, but most of us would try to rescue a pet.
- You can think out of the box and you can help others think out of the box, one step at a time, one line at a time in a logical, strategic way. It is not so much having a good idea that’s hard. It’s more about your ability to develop the idea that will win people over. Developing an idea in an original and effective way takes time, thoughts, research, emotional involvement, real-life experiences. A great idea is a whole experience.
How do you know you have a great idea for a story?
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