In a new blog post, DeAnna Knippling offers advice for picking the story you want to write, which she calls the invisible question. “The question is invisible because writers tend to come up with a lot of writing ideas, then fail to follow through on them,” she explains.
Writer’s block is what happens after you start to write. Brainstorming ideas is fun, but if you don’t already know what you want to write, you might end up with a long list of prompts and no idea what to work on. How do you decide that? Knippling divides the process into two parts: how to know what you want to write, and how to translate that into a fiction starting point.
“At the heart of knowing what you want to write is knowing what you want, period,” she says, making three suggestions:
- Experiment and see what makes you feel good.
- Research and see what options are available.
- Ask for informed expert opinions (from people you trust).
“What are you passionate about right now?” Knippling asks. “What was the last thing that made you feel passionate? happy? sad? angry? frustrated? interested? opinionated?” Finding that passion is key to determining what you want to write and, importantly, what will motivate you to start and finish your work.
When it comes to genre, Knippling says that just because you haven’t written in a certain genre before doesn’t mean you can’t do it now. If you’re struggling to make a choice, why not pick a new area? Working in a new genre might free you to experiment and have fun playing with new tropes and ideas.
Knippling also suggests picking two new genres. “Picking two genres isn’t the same as writing a cross-genre story,” she says. “A cross-genre story is a story split about 50/50 between two genres. You will instead pick two genres and make one of them more important (80/20-ish), for example, a mystery with a romance in it, or a horror story with Western themes.” In the post, Knippling examines the emotional basis for various genres to show how they might cross over to create a subgenre.
So, if you don’t know what you want to right next? Make a list of things that made you feel passionate and art that you turned to for comfort. Find the cross-over emotion in the genre list. Brainstorm ideas based on those connections. “Be as cheesy or cool as possible,” Knippling says. “You don’t have to be original or deep. The details of your story can be original and deep! But on the writing idea level, stories are meant to tap something universal in people, which usually translates to something cheesy or cool.”
