WHERE IDEAS COME FROM
Ah, the age old question: what's my writing process? Well. This is a rather tough question for me to answer, and it's definitely not because I'm chaos personified (spoiler alert, it absolutely is).
So in order to break it down, let's start from the beginning—how do I come up with ideas? How do I know when these ideas are ready to be pursued, and how do I tackle the challenge of narrowing those ideas down to make a cohesive story?
Inspiration comes from a lot of places for me. For OBBT, it was inspired by a few things. Namely:
Dungeons and Dragons
Crescent City
Cyberpunk 2077
My main goal with this series was to satisfy my own desperate need for queer-centric fantasy with unique settings. And not hinted-at queerness. No, I wanted queer fantasy stories that are so in your face with the queerness it's never a question if they're queer. After queer characters being relegated to side characters and brief mentions for so long, I was desperate for more stories with canon queer main characters.
With that need now a central focus, I finally had somewhere to start.
I get really excited about a blank document. Enough that first drafts are my favorite, even though they never get beyond halfway through the second act before I have to stop and go back to the beginning.
This first "half-draft" is what helps me narrow down ideas. I'm writing on autopilot by this point, brain dumping everything I want to try and include in this story in an attempt to be cohesive. But more often than not, it becomes obvious about halfway through that I can't possibly include everything I want to include this way.
This is when I'll stop, reread everything, and figure out what works and what doesn't. If I'm cutting out ideas, I'll sometimes save them for later, or get rid of them altogether. This is a really chaotic process for whittling down ideas, I know, but it works well for me!
Now how do I figure out if the idea is worth pursuing at all? It becomes pretty obvious in those first few chapters of a first draft whether or not I'm excited about it enough to continue. And it becomes even more obvious if I stop to plot and have no idea how to continue. But that doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing ever, it usually just means it's not right now.
I hope this little bit of insight was interesting to read, and gives you at least a semi-decent idea of the constant chaos that is swirling inside my brain at all times. Stay tuned for more of these posts as I try to describe what in the world my writing process even is. Next time—drafting and plotting!
*insert winky face here*,
-Tia
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