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Writers are geniuses. They produce great ideas out of thin air. With a slight of hand they create a complicated story and win the Booker Price. Right?
Wrong.
I wont deny the possibility of a true genius writer now and then, but for us mere mortal writers developing a story is work. We almost never experience the instant flash that gives us a complete, perfect story.
Building a story is a craft. Mostly there is just a glimpse of an idea to start with.
For TMA 02 of A215 we have to create a short story so I dove into my idea box. (What this box exactly is and what you can find in it, I’ll explain in another posting.) For this time, I came up with some older notes. Four snippets with very rough story ideas. I transferred them into my writer’s notebook and let them settle into my mind. Slowly I realized I’d use the ‘sun remote’ idea for my TMA02 short story.
“What if anybody is able to control the sun with a remote? Sure it would end in chaos and bloodshed.”
The evolution of the idea started instantly.
I found the vision of “everybody has the power to remote control the sun” to hard for a short story. Especially, it was hard to find a character a reader can relate to in this scenario. So my second idea was inspired by the “Curators of Sweden“-Twitter account.
“What if a single family is granted the power of remote controlling the sun for just one day?”
With this idea, the first images of real characters came. Clearly there was the voice of the families father in my head, talking to the neighbor. So the idea slowly came to life and I scribbled down the first notes and snippets of dialogue.
