A great idea does not make a great novel. In fact, it takes several ideas to make a single novel. I may come up with a deeply immersive setting, but without a nuanced characters to explore it, I won’t hold a readers attention. I’ll also need to send these characters into conflict and develop that conflict in interesting ways. These are the ingredients of a story: plot, setting, and character. And almost every good novel has multiple ideas for each of those elements.
Epic fantasy novels have a whole world to flesh out, and they have plenty of pages to do so. Naturally, this requires dozens of ideas worth exploring. You can’t write thousands of pages about a world if you don’t have the ideas to populate it. But even if you’re not writing The Wheel of Time (4 million words across 14 books), you still need more than one idea.
Let’s look at a shorter book. Coraline by Neil Gaiman clocks in at roughly 30,000 words, and is technically considered a novella. Yet we have so many ideas here. We meet plethora of characters, each compelling in their own unique way. Like retired actresses Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, who put on shows for an audience of Scottish Terriers.
Although the main plot conflict resides between Coraline and Other Mother, we have subplots, too. Such as that of the ghost children, who cannot pass on without getting their souls back.
Even the house, which acts as the setting for pretty much the entire book, is many ideas rolled into one. In the real world, the house is boring and acts as a catalyst to get Coraline searching for adventure. In the Other World, the house is a trap, designed to lure Coraline closer to the beldam.
So if you want to write a novel, you’ll need more than one idea. Maybe you want to write a story in a post-apocalyptic, flooded Earth. That’s interesting, but you’ll need an equally and independently interesting protagonist to carry us through this world.
Maybe you also had a separate idea; you want to write a story about a girl with a sweet tooth and an aversion to social situations. You didn’t imagine her in a flooded world, but that’s okay. Put her there anyway, and see what happens. She’ll have a hard time finding candy if she doesn’t venture out into the high seas. And she won’t survive for long out there without a crew, which means she’ll have to deal with people. Already, we’ve got conflict.
Our plot might follow the sweet-tooth captain as she assembles a crew to track down an abandoned candy factory. But we’ll need interesting characters to fill out that crew, and interesting places on our flooded Earth for them to visit. You get the picture.
We don’t want to go overboard (ha, nautical pun) with ideas, though. To some extent, the amount of ideas should be proportional to our word count. Don’t include so many ideas that you don’t explore any of them in depth. But I more often found my early stories lacking strong ideas than overfilled with them.
The actionable takeaway is this; allow your many wonderful ideas to coalesce. Keep track of all your character, plot, and setting ideas. Find places to insert those ideas to drum up interesting situations where otherwise you might’ve felt lost or bored. And most of all, explore the ideas that excite you. Your excitement will keep you writing, and the more you write, the more you improve.
– AJG
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