Now that I’ve covered the necessary background of what
NaNoWriMo is and what you should do to get ready for it, I can back up a few
steps and address those who would like to participate, but haven’t really given
much thought to writing a novel until now.
One of the most common questions interested parties ask novelists and
other storytellers is “Where do you get your ideas?” It makes sense that this would be one of the
first questions people would ask, as almost every story ever written began its
life as a simple idea – or, phrased a little bit differently, a “What If.”
It Always Starts With
“What If . . . ?”
In many ways, “What If” is the very core of
storytelling. Describing “What Is”
doesn’t require a storyteller; all it requires is an attentive observer. But considering “What If” implies a two-step
process of posing a question, and then working out an answer. Unlike the realm of “What Is,” neither
question nor answer actually exists.
Both seem to spring from the storyteller like Athena from Zeus’s
forehead: full-grown and ready to wage war.
Which can lead the casual onlooker to wonder: how did she get in there –
and where did she find her weapons?
Like everything else in life, ideas for storytelling come
from our experiences; they are not, however, limited to them. A novelist can write about a murderer, or
even from the viewpoint of a killer, without having ever taken a life. Gene Roddenberry could create warp drives and
Klingons without ever having to stop and work out whether either of them could
actually exist. In fact, the premise of Star Trek could easily be posed as a
“What If” question:
What if advanced
technology and an intergalactic egalitarian society allowed humankind to send
its best and brightest out to explore the final frontier of outer space?
Or Lord of the Rings:
What if a ring of limitless
and corrupting power fell into the hands of a young hobbit?
Or the Harry Potter series:
What if an orphaned
boy discovers he is the wizarding world’s best hope against the very dark lord
who orphaned him?
In posing what could be, and then attempting to answer that
question, we take on the central challenge that storytellers have assumed since
time immemorial. It’s the first step in
a journey that, in truth, can never end – and where the journey itself is
everything.
Building to Critical
Mass
Sometimes, no matter what idea you try to plug into the
“What If” rubric, it just seems to fall short.
If that happens – or, more specifically, when – don’t panic. And
don’t simply discard your idea. Just
because it falls short on its own doesn’t mean it’s inherently doomed to
failure. It just needs a little help,
and try as we may, we aren’t always up to the task of giving our ideas the help
they need, at the very moment they need them.
And that’s OK, because ideas come to us all the time, if
we’re prepared to recognize and retain them.
As long as we hold on to those ideas that seem to fall short, they’ll be
on hand when another idea comes – one that is, perhaps, also not quite enough
on its own – and can lend us a hand. As
Orson Scott Card notes in his Characters
and Viewpoint, combining two distinct ideas can give rise to something
completely original and utterly compelling in a way that either idea alone
could never achieve. (His Nebula and Hugo Award-winning novel Speaker for the Dead is a great example,
being a combination of the continuing storyline from Ender’s Game and an initially separate idea of a “speaker for the
dead.”)
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