I guess I'm new in town, though I've for a period of time followed the topics that has been discussed, and it has been very interestning.

A short introduction of myself would be that I'm 33 years old and live in a town called Vasteras which is located about 100 km west of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.

I'd consider myself as a struggling writer, with emphasis on that struggling part. I've many times felt an urge to write, though I don't get much writing done. I've finaly concluded that one way of looking att the writing process is to divide it into three parts. The first part is that you need some sort of an idea and the second part is to transform that idea into a story. What remains after that is the third part which is to write the story down.

My problem is the second part. That one about turning an idea into a story. How do you folks go ahead with this? What is your usual approach on this subject? I understand the basic ingredients like you need a world where the story should take place and that you need some characters that the reader feels and care for, but how do you make this cooking? I might add that I've read some of the usual books in this subject, but yet it feels like I lack something when I try to make a connection between the idea and the story.

There's a lot more ways, of course. Keep at it, and you'll find something that'll make the story come alive for you. And welcome to the boards.

Just as an example, let me hold a personal "thousand ideas in an hour" session. Let's take an contemporary fantasy idea (this is just off the top of my head, so my apologies if the basic idea is crap) and say that there's a magical entity that lives in electric currents of a building.

Now let's start asking questions. The first one that comes to mind is, how did it get there? I start out by thinking of plausible reasons for a creature to live in electricity. "It's always been there" doesn't work because we obviously only recently began using electricity. So it must have gotten there in some way, or else been created since. On the line of thinking that this is a naturally occurring creature, I start thinking of the most obvious natural occurrence of electricity--lightning. So what if this creature lived in cloud formations, particularly storm clouds? Perhaps there are others of its kind there, as well. Maybe a bolt of lightning hits a lightning rod on top of an elementary school (I was going to say high school, but that brings up too many memories of supernatural occurrences in shows like Buffy and Smallville, so I threw that out), and the only way for the creature to survive was to jump into the electricity lines of the building. Just pulling a random number out of my head, let's say this was 32 years ago.

Let's stop for a second and take a look at what we have so far. After a few minutes of development, I took a very simple idea and fleshed out an entire backstory, providing a rich well of story ideas to draw from. There's still much more development to do, but we've already discovered that this is happening at an elementary school, that the creature used to live among others of his kind and now does not--and by inferrence, that the absence of electricity will destroy him.

We still haven't touched upon the most important question, though, not to mention more issues involving the nature of the creature. But the most important question is, "who is this story about?". There are a lot of possibilities. Since this story takes place at an elementary school, the most obvious answer is "a little kid". But that's not the only possibility--it could be about a teacher, the principal, the stereotypical cafeteria lady, or even the parent of a child who's somehow involved with this electricity creature. Maybe it's even a janitor or a man from the electricity company trying to fix the school's weird problems with their lights.

See how many possibilities there are? And each one of them would be a different story. A child could go many directions. The most obvious, for the child and many others, would be to rescue the creature in some way. Or maybe the child is having a serious, real world problem and his/her association with the creature somehow helps to resolve it.

The obvious story idea that comes from considering a teacher is the "is this real or am I nuts?" story. That one is used a little too often, however, so I'd be more in favor of the slightly less cliched "science teacher figuring out how to get the creature home" story.

Or what about the principal? Maybe she's scared for her job and the children, because the previous problems with the electricity have started to get much worse and very strange. The story could be about that, and that could even bring up the question of "what's worth more? My job, or the kids?".

I won't go on. There's a lot more development to do in a lot of areas--the capabilities of the creature, its level of intelligence, the real world life of whatever character you choose to work with... all will need to be fully fleshed out. But hopefully I've shown a workable process for developing an idea into a story. Good luck with your own!

The thing I was missing was the characters. I don't mean deep character development, I mean that the idea I had was character-free. I think I first realized this when I read "Neutron Star," not because any of the characters were stellar, but because I thought to myself: "What would I have written if I had had that idea?" And I realized that, at the best, I'd have come up with some scientist studying a neutron star. Really dull.

All we can do is share our experiences - but you will find your own way. Try just sitting down and writing from an idea or two. You may discover WHY you need to work out your ideas in advance. Or you may find you can just do it. I've definitely found I need to be in the "prepare first, write later" group. Then I found that was not my major issue - knowing my ending was the issue. I decided to sit and try to write something recently without planning other than knowing the beginning, ending, and a basic thought about the main character - it went pretty well, and now I'm reworking it with lots of ideas!

See if you can expand from 'idea' or two to an ending - where do you want to go with this? Then go back and ask the questions - whose story is it, what is it about, when does it happen, where does it happen, how does it happen, why should the reader care, etc.

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I understand the basic ingredients like you need a world where the story should take place and that you need some characters that the reader feels and care for, but how do you make this cooking? I might add that I've read some of the usual books in this subject, but yet it feels like I lack something when I try to make a connection between the idea and the story.

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And I did say one of the biggest differences between an idea and a story. You can have a full-fledged story in your head with stunning characters and scenes but its still just an idea if it is only in your head.

Actually, one of the best pieces of advice I've heard was "Don't confuse the plot with the story. A plot is what happens, a story is how you tell it."

My problem has been exactly as AeroB1033 describes it. I've had an idea and without developing it any further I've began to write, and got stuck few pages later.

Besides three short stories that I've somehow managed to pull off I've mostly only written single scenarios with only one event or happening containing some dialog and some action. I've done this mostly to keep on writing.

But now I relise that those single scenarios could be a goldmine. If I start asking some questions about how those characters ended up in that scenario and develop some background to them, it could give me what I need to write a short story or perhaps a novel. I think I'll try with that and see what happens.

I guess also that I'll heed AeroB1033s advice on how to develop an idea because it seems to make some good sence. When I've for instanse read OSC Character & viewpoint I've got more of what to do rather than how to do it, but I think I'll reread the book.

Yet again... thank you all for helping me out :-)

1. Just write something. Don't worry about the quality, write anything, as quickly as you can. Spend maybe a week on it, then read it back. See what worked and what didn't. You can get good ideas like this.

2. A crucial part is finding the right characters. If you just have a situation but no characters to deal with it, it can be hard. And the first characters you think of aren't necessarily the best: the next project I intend to work on is a second shot at an idea I had a while back, a world where due to a non-intervention policy a wild human population has been practically left to its own devices for hundreds of years and is about to discover what has happened. The first time I tried telling this through the eyes of the observers, and it really didn't work. I think I've got some better characters now, and I can focus on the details of life in this world much more easily. I'll be keeping 1 character from my last attempt.

So... how do you work out which character is the best to use as your main character? One piece of advice (credited to Theodore Sturgeon, if memory serves) is to ask this question: whom does it hurt the most?

That helped me a lot.

[edited to fix grammar]

In my above example, there's a magical occurrence happening at an elementary school. All of the possible characters I referred to came to my mind because I was thinking about who would be around this elementary school.

Once I settle on a character--a generality, like the one above ("elementary school kid", "principal of an elementary school", "janitor at an elementary school"), then I start to flesh him or her out by asking questions about who they are. How old is the character? Is the character male or female? What's the character's immediate family like, particularly his or her parents and any influential siblings? Are there any major events in the past that set the character on his or her current course? Tying into that, why is the character doing what he or she is doing now?

In the real world, characters are wandering around all the time, it's not until conflict happens that they become players. Without a conflict, there is no need for someone to rise above the rest. When a school bus rolls over, someone always pulls the children out. The details of their life don't become important in the "story" until that happens. The conflict had to happen first. If there are problems with a story, chances are that it's the conflict that's the problem.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is, a situation is much like a news story until you make it your character's situation. And that's what I like to do.

Authors who take a single idea and try to write a story from it often end up running out of steam rather quickly.

If you take that single idea and try putting it with at least one more idea, you have a better chance of getting a story out of them because they work off of each other and create a synergy (something that is greater than the sum of its parts).

So don't try creating a story with a single idea. Find at least one other totally unrelated idea to combine it with and you may be surprised at what happens.