In the current season of the Writing Excuses podcast, the team is going through what they call the “elemental genres” – treating genre not so much in terms of flavour and set dressing as in terms of story shape and the kind of development you’re likely to find there.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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To help them distinguish from the marketing-label genres, they’re using different terminology. Instead of SF, for example, they talk about “the Idea elemental genre,” in which you explore a what-if.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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(The following is an adapted extract from the draft of my nonfiction book Writing Short<\/em>, currently in preparation).<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary Robinette Kowal,\u00a0in this episode, offers a couple of useful approaches for working with “idea” stories. She uses Orson Scott Card\u2019s \u201cMICE Quotient\u201d (which I have renamed, I think more accessibly, the SPEC elements: Setting, Problem, Events, Character). I\u2019ve added the examples below to her original list:<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n How does the setting<\/strong> create conflict?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n – Threats in the physical environment that make it difficult to travel through or just live in (dangerous creatures, disease, pollution, mountains to climb, rivers to ford, seas to cross, hard vacuum all around a space station).<\/p>\n\n\n\n – Social inequalities (the Man is keeping a brother down; the brother gets woke).<\/p>\n\n\n\n – Rival groups. (This is a particularly fertile area; I was stuck on my novel City of Masks<\/em> for a long time until I mapped out the various groups and how their agendas clashed, then assigned various characters to the factions and put those characters in contact with each other. From there, it more or less wrote itself.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n – Valuable resources for which competition exists (a classic steampunk element, though you can also use it in other genres).<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n How does the story\u2019s problem<\/strong> create conflict?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n – The detective wants the mystery solved, the criminal doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n – More generally: the protagonist wants to achieve a goal, the antagonist doesn\u2019t want that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n – Even if there\u2019s no specific antagonist, the protagonist needs some kind of resources (perhaps information or help) from someone else in order to solve the problem, and whoever controls those resources is disinclined to assist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n – Different characters compete for a McGuffin (some object or objective that\u2019s only important because people want it; a Maltese falcon).<\/p>\n\n\n\n – Different people want to solve the problem in different ways, and argue about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n – The protagonist tries different solutions, and the first few don\u2019t work (a try-fail cycle).<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n How do the events<\/strong> create conflict?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n – Just when the protagonist seems to be making progress, a new external problem occurs to knock them back. (The opposite of the deus ex machina, where a convenient solution turns up out of nowhere; considered legitimate, while the deus ex machina is considered a cheat.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n – The protagonist\u2019s solution to the first step in the problem itself creates or reveals further problems. (This approach is the heart of Jack M. Bickham\u2019s excellent craft book Scene and Structure<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n How do the characters<\/strong> create conflict? (Some of these overlap with the \u201cproblem\u201d conflicts, obviously.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n – They disagree about ways and means to achieve joint goals. (One will win out, to the annoyance of the other, and may turn out to be wrong, or may be vindicated by events.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n – They\u2019re allies who disagree about what their joint goal should be. (Similar resolution.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n – They have different goals, and each one pursuing their own goal brings them into conflict because their immediate goals are in conflict. (The hero wants a mentor; the old warrior wants to be left alone to brood.) This one can be resolved by finding a way in which their deeper goals align, and the process of doing so can give you a good chunk of story; or it can continue to be a source of conflict until one defeats the other, in which case you have a protagonist and an antagonist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n – They\u2019re in direct competition for the same goal. (Protagonist\/antagonist, but they\u2019re in a race or competition of some kind.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n – They should be working together, but don\u2019t trust\/like each other. (Make sure you make this believable, rather than just manufacturing distrust or dislike for the sake of plot. Giving them backstories where they each don\u2019t trust\/like the kind<\/em>\u00a0of person that the other character is, or appears to be, is a classic approach; it enables you to collapse the distrust when they get to know each other as people rather than types, typically while working together in a common cause. See Legolas and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the same podcast, Mary Robinette Kowal also suggests working backwards from the idea (asking \u201cwhy?\u201d to figure out the causes) and forwards from the idea (asking \u201cwhat if?\u201d to figure out the consequences). This fills out the idea and enriches it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n _____________________<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n I find getting story ideas easy – I have about 60 of them in a file I keep, even after I removed the ones I’ve used – but developing them is a different matter. I’ve pulled out the seven that I feel are closest to being “ripe”, and I’m going through them using the above approaches to fill them out into outlines that I can write from.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n