Novel Idea

I have the opposite of writer’s block.

This sounds like a wonderful problem to have until you realize I am currently writing fifteen novels at the same time.

Twelve of them will admit they know me.

The other three...

Well. That's another story.

Fifteen is not the number of novel ideas I have. God, no. There are more of those scattered through my Notes app. Half-formed premises. Titles with no stories attached. Characters who introduced themselves and then refused to elaborate. Questions I thought about for too long. Endings without beginnings. Beginnings that wandered off before they found an ending.

Some ideas end up on the writing-room floor.

Some get folded carefully and put in a drawer for later.

Some are still shuffling around in the attic.

But fifteen of them have made themselves at home.

And they will not stop talking.

I don't really know where a novel begins for me because it is almost never in the same place.

Sometimes I pick up an object in an antique store and immediately wonder who owned it. Antique stores are one of my favorite ways to spend a few hours on a work trip, which means I have given my imagination entirely too much access to other people's abandoned belongings.

Sometimes I meet someone and a character begins forming before I've even left the room. Not that person, exactly. Something about them. A mannerism. A contradiction. The way they said one particular thing.

Sometimes it's a word.

One word catches on another, which catches on another, and suddenly there is a barrage of them.

Sometimes a title arrives first.

Sometimes I have a thought, argue with myself about it, take the opposing position, argue with myself from that side, research both arguments and emerge several hours later having essentially written a thesis and dissertation intended for an audience of one.

Sometimes I know the ending.

That's particularly inconvenient.

Now I have to figure out what happened.

And sometimes there is no discernible beginning at all. A character simply starts talking.

That's probably the strangest part of writing for me. At some point, the story stops feeling like something I'm constructing and starts feeling like something I'm listening to.

I know they're mine. I know all of this is happening inside my own head.

But there are days when writing feels less like invention and more like channeling. I sit down, find the voice, and let the character tell me where we're going.

They don't always go where I thought they would.

I've learned to follow them anyway.

Maybe that's why I don't work on one manuscript until it's finished and then politely proceed to the next. When I sit down to write, I usually go to whichever story is shouting the loudest that day.

Some days one of them whispers a single sentence.

Another kicks down the door.

I can lose an entire day that way.

I'll look up and realize I've spent hours somewhere that doesn't exist with people who aren't real, and somehow it feels less like I spent the day writing about them than like I spent the day with them.

The writing doesn't necessarily stop when I close the manuscript, either.

I'm plotting while doing other things. Researching some obscure question because a story needs to know the answer. Turning scenes over in my head. Saving fragments to my phone before they disappear. Following one historical footnote into another and another until I've forgotten what I originally went looking for.

There is almost always something being written in the background of my mind.

This is useful.

It is also a problem.

Because generating ideas and finishing them are two very different disciplines.

When one story goes quiet, I don't have to stare at its blinking cursor and wait for it to come back. There are fourteen others waving their arms.

So I move.

That keeps me from getting bogged down. It keeps writing exciting. It means I rarely experience the terrifying emptiness I've heard described as writer's block.

But eventually, books have to be finished.

And that requires telling fourteen very persistent imaginary worlds to be quiet because today belongs to this one.

I'm still learning how to do that.

There are more ideas waiting in my Notes app. I'm sure some will stay there forever. Some deserve to. Some will probably resurface years from now and surprise me. Others may spend their lives shuffling around the attic, occasionally knocking something over just to remind me they're still up there.

But these fifteen made it out.

They grew characters and histories and covers and titles. They accumulated research. They developed voices. They became places I could enter.

Somewhere along the way, they stopped feeling like ideas.

They moved in.

I don't know where novel ideas come from.

I know only that mine rarely knock.

They let themselves in, make themselves comfortable, and start talking.

Lately, fifteen of them are talking at once.