Romantic Fiction Writing - How to find ideas

Characters generate their own stories

Some writers of romantic fiction regard ideas as the gems on which their fortune will be based. I believe, on the contrary, that ideas are a dime a dozen, available in such profusion that you’re never likely to run short of them. If this proposition sounds ludicrous to you – if ideas, or the lack of them, are the stumbling block in your creative path – then this short series of articles is for you.

Where do ideas come from? Well, we’ve all heard stories about great ideas occurring to writers under a hundred different circumstances. All Coleridge needed to dream up his masterpiece, Kubla Khan, was a pipeful of opium… X dreamed up the central idea of his best-seller on the underground, when his eye lit on a deadbeat asleep in a corner… The entire plot of her magnum opus occurred to Y when she was on the verge of sleep one night…

These and similarly stories abound. But these are lucky accidents. They certainly happen. They’ve happened to me. But the point is, it’s difficult to make them happen.

The four mechanisms I’m going to suggest as prolific sources of ideas are all within your control. You can return to them time and again, milking them for smaller or larger notions.

Here they are:
• Characters bring their stories with them
• Daydreams
• Real life
• Your clippings file

Start with a character and everything else will follow…

Characters come with their stories in invisible knapsacks on their back. All you’ve got to do is make the acquaintance of the character, and she (or he) will tell you her tail.
So, let’s do a little imagining…

I think of… A red-haired woman with a knot of hair and a wild look in her eyes. Where do you spot her? Across a crowded room at a book launch. Is that panic you see in her expression, or the sort of wildness that attracts some men and frightens others? What is she murmuring to the man beside her? You edge up to her and eavesdrop. She needs to leave at once, she’s saying. Her daughter’s in trouble.

Right. That paragraph was written at breakneck speed on my laptop without much thought. The seed that provoked the scene was the image of the woman. I see now that she lies at the heart of a mystery. Her daughter’s in trouble. What sort of trouble, I wonder. Who is the man she’s speaking to? Why is she at a book launch? Is it her book, or his?

I feel myself trembling on the verge of a dozen possibilities. Where is her daughter? Trapped by an intruder in her apartment? Pregnant and abandoned in Bali? In the hands of the police at Heathrow who claim to have discovered four kilograms of cocaine in her baggage? Each of these versions of reality lead to a dozen lot possibilities. I must choose one.

She’s in Bali. She’s pregnant. The father of her unborn child is an Australian drug runner (the edge of one idea seeps into another) who’s scarpered with the drugs, but has left her with a briefcase full of money. Or who’s scarpered with the money, but has left her with a briefcase full of cocaine.

Right, this doesn’t look much like a romance at the moment, but it has lots of romatic possibilities. The girl’s mother – our red-haired, wild-eyed beauty – flies out to Bali to help her daughter. En route she meets a man ( well, of course she does) who, when he hears our heroine’s story, offers to help. Or not…

Now, let’s stand back from that story and consider the process by which it got whipped into existence.

I thought of a character. In no great depth. Just “red hair” and a “wild look in her eye.” But it was enough to prompt a small avalanche of ideas.

The beauty of this technique is that you don’t even have to make up your character. You can sit in your favourite coffee shop, note book open in front of you, and check out the characters in your immediate vicinity. That teenager with the ironware studding her nose and ears and lip, for instance… Or the prim housewife in the slightly-too-tight jeans, gazing down into her coffee cup… Each of them is the kicking-off point for a story that will, at least to start with, tell itself…

That’s the point of characters. They cry out for stories. Dream up (or observe) a character, and you’re already half way towards uncovering her story.

It’s as simple as that.

In the next article in this series, we’ll interrogate day-dreams as a source of ideas

Richard Beynon is a television and film writer. He runs online romance writing courses on allaboutlove.net and face-to-face writing courses in Johannesburg.