Find The Right Way To Tell Your Story

I periodically get asked, "What kind of things do you like to write about?" The answer has changed over the years. Right now, my answer is "I like to write the stories that other people don't."

This usually means that I am playing with tropes. I see the same thing happen over and over again and I just have to do something different. The problem with this is that I come up with a lot of ideas that would make terrible stories.

Have you ever noticed that every person with superpowers eventually uses them, either for good or evil, no matter how reluctant they are? How come nobody has the willpower to stand by their convictions and just live a normal life as a normal person, ignoring their powers completely?

Oh yeah. Because it's BORING. Who cares about a story where a guy can do cool stuff and never does? Nobody. Real life is already filled with lots of people who never do anything interesting. Reading about such a person is not entertaining (making it fail at the cardinal rule of writing).

A lot of my ideas in that vein end up going nowhere because they have nowhere to go. Another idea was about the life of a one-shot background character. Consider a movie or comic book where the hero falls out of the sky, lands right next to some random person who we've never seen before and never see ever again, then cracks a joke or steals a kiss and runs off. We always follow the hero, but I want to know more about the other person. What was her life like before all of that happened? What was it like afterward? What if nothing else interesting ever happened to her?

Well, that sounds like yet another wonderfully boring story. However, after enough time, I realized that there was a way to tell this story. I turned it into a memoir, where the woman is older and looking back on her life. She talks about how her life was nothing spectacular growing up, that she had this one experience which was truly amazing, and how the rest of her life never compared to that moment, which made her cynical and misanthropic. By writing it this way, I could tell the story I want, but glaze over the boring parts, making it short, but to the point.

I don't think I would go so far as to say that every idea could make for a good story, but I will say that just because an idea doesn't seem workable doesn't mean it's impossible. Play around with it some. And when you don't feel like playing with it anymore, leave it alone and let it stew around in your head. It may just come to you out of nowhere.