During an interview with the Creative Penn podcast, Jessie Kwak offers advice for turning an idea into a short story or a short into a novel.
Kwak uses freewriting and journaling to start expanding the seed of an idea into a potential story. She’s also used Tarot cards to suggest ways a story could branch out. Saving articles, images, and quotes in a single idea file is another method for stockpiling ideas and inspiration. “I think it’s really fun to see how those start to combine and grow with each other,” Kwak says. “It’s almost like throwing a bunch of seeds in a garden and then seeing what starts to pop up. Except that with writing, the seeds will join with each other and come up with a weird hybrid.”
One challenge is making sure your protagonist’s problems fit in the container you’ve made. “I tried to write a short story and I would try to include, okay, here’s this big geopolitical event, and then here’s this international scandal,” Kwak says. “And then here’s this person also has a conflict with like their father, and then their boyfriend’s breaking up with them or whatever. I’m trying to write a 2,000-word short story with all of that, that’s not going to work.”
If you’re writing a short story from a big idea, Kwak suggests finding the smallest problem your hero could have with your subject. “Narrowing your focus into that, the biggest problem you’re trying to solve in a single-story, I think can really help scale your idea up or down,” she says.
