Perhaps you’re a beginning writer with a great idea for a story. Or maybe you’re an experienced author and someone has come to you with a story idea and suggested you just whip up the story inspired by that idea. Either way, there’s something writers know that non-writers don’t — the idea is the easy part.
Would you approach a 
sculptor with a sketch, then gesture to a nearby block of marble and suggest the sculptor merely chip away at the block until it looks like your sketch? Would you hum a tune to a composer, and suggest she spend a few minutes penning some lyrics and orchestrating all the instruments to play the harmonic parts to fit with your hummed tune?
It’s not clear to me why people think writing is so different. Somehow the belief got started that writers search and search for something to write about, that we spend 90% of our time enduring the agony of waiting for the idea to hit. Once it does, we simply dash off the story and hit send, apparently. A particularly long novel might, they think, take the better part of an afternoon to jot down.
I hate to be the one to burst the bubble on that myth, but it just ain’t so. On occasion, it’s true, some writers struggle to figure out what to write about. For a time, they seek some prompt. There are books and websites to supply these, but there’s also real life–it’s all around, filled with plenty of things that could form the basis of a story. Even that’s not enough. Next the writer must turn this ‘prompt’ into an idea. This idea forms the skeleton of the story. An idea includes main characters, a rough primary plot, and some notion of settings.
I don’t mean to downplay the difficulty of getting that far. But a writer reaching that point is a long way from finished. Moreover, we have no sense yet of whether the resulting story will be good. Promising ideas still can suffer from poor execution when converted to finished form. Alternately, a truly wonderful tale can be spun from a trivial, humdrum idea.
A writer with an idea now faces the task of fleshing out that skeleton. He must breathe life into the characters, making them identifiable and engaging. She must select such descriptive words for her settings so as to transport the reader there. He embellishes the plot with understandable motives for actions, and adds subplots. She imbues the story with her own style and flair, ensuring she touches on universal human themes. When his first draft is crap, as it always is, he edits and rewrites, often several times. During these subsequent drafts, she might spice the manuscript with symbolism, alliteration, foreshadowing, character quirks, tension-building techniques, allusion, metaphor, and the other little things separating good from average fiction. Then, because the story is now too long, he goes through it again, compressing, trimming, cutting, and making each word defend itself.
I’ve made this fleshing-out process sound like drudgery, and sometimes it is. True writers find enjoyment in it, or at least tolerate it. But it is not the easy part. For me, writing consists of the same proportions as Thomas Edison’s formula for genius–1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Perhaps someday when I’ve written many hundreds of stories it will get more difficult to come up with new ideas, but I’m a long way from that. Even then the percentages will likely be 2% and 98%.
Were you laboring under a misconception about the difficulty of ideas and the ease of writing? Have I changed your mind? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment. While I wait for you to do that, it’s back to the hard work of fleshing out another skeleton for–
Poseidon’s Scribe
