WRITING

From 3 Words to 6 Books

My process for developing a story idea

I was recently doing a TikTok Live with a fellow creator when they said the words that light me up: “I have plenty of ideas but I have constant writer’s block.”

Well, didn’t that just shove me over the edge of passive conversation and send me hurtling headfirst into my own process. I don’t think I took a breath as I explained how in 18 months I went from the original three-word concept of zombies in space to a fully fleshed out world and a paranormal sci-fi series of 6 novels written, 3 more to come, and 3 side series of at least 3 books each. 3 seems to be the magic number. Once I had them caught up, they thanked me and said they could see a path to their own storytelling; a way to do it.

So, let me share it with you. Perhaps you’ll find something helpful. My process has evolved over ten years and will continue to evolve. I’ve written over 30 books and have a Master of Arts in writing (among other degrees). I don’t share this to showboat but rather to share that I’ve worked my butt off to refine my process to where it is today. It works for me, for now. Keep that in mind. Okay, let’s do this.

My Process Steps from Idea to All the Words

Step 1. The Idea

It began with an idea — what if zombies were in space? I wrote that idea literally as zombies in space in my ideas spreadsheet. My ideas spreadsheet in a simple excel file in which I write the ‘idea’ and notes if I have any. 6 months later, I returned to my spreadsheet seeking my next project, and zombies in space jumped out at me — figuratively speaking.

Step 2. Get curious!

If curiosity is the lifeblood of a writer, then “What if?” questions are the veins and arteries that keep it pumping. I began asking myself:

• What if there were vampires in space too?
• What if the government fed the zombies?
• What if there were wolves?
• What if there were uprisings of paranormals?
• What if they were called unhumans?
• What if they could do things humans couldn’t so humans trained them to serve them?
• What if their supernatural abilities meant they could travel further and faster in space than humans?
• What if the humans used them to advance space exploration?

I jotted down every idea no matter how out of place it seemed. I’m a character writer so I listened for words, thoughts, anything (nothing is insignificant), and note it down. I asked my characters questions, and I trusted their answers even when I didn’t understand them.

Step 3. Selecting a Planning Tool

For NUSA, I used Dan Harmon’s Story circle. Other options could be the hero’s journey, romancing the beat, the three-act structure, etc. Here is a youtube video that takes you through each step of the story circle and what each means.

I’ve literally copy and pasted my story circle steps below. This was the first time I ever used the story circle and I wasn’t yet proficient (not even close), but you have to start somewhere and this goes to show that something is better than nothing.

You: 5 un-humans decide to apply to join the Nondoniminational Unhuman Space Academy.

Need: They want to do something big

Go: They succeed in pushing the asteroid off course and are heroes. Suddenly, everyone wants to know them

Search: They try being regular kids

Find: They are suddenly popular

Return: They admit it was an accident and they don’t know how they did it. They are bullied again

Change: But they have each other now and they have each discovered their unique skills. They decided to come together to save the world and they do

I wrote this less than three years ago but it makes me shake my head at how bad it is. I’m not hitting the story circle elements and this does not form a coherent story plan. But again, it’s something I could build on. And I did. Lose perfectionism and go for SOMETHING.

Step 4. Dot Pointing the Sections

Now that I had my story circle outline, I could build each section into a list of dot points of events. The below are the dot points I built for the first section of the story circle: “YOU”.

• 5 un-humans decide to apply to join the Nondoniminational Unhuman Space Academy.
• They are all shortlisted and given their orders to board a spaceship to the moon to attend the pre-training testing and selection process.
• There are 100 candidates in this year’s selection process.
• Anatasia and Anton are twin vampires. Anastasia has always been intrigued by the stars and Anton applied to encourage her to but has no real interest.
• Jackson, a young werewolf was invited to the academy because his parents were prominent in the werewolf communities. He is a pubescent cub.
• Pete, the Zombie doesn’t even remember applying.
• Gracie, the shapeshifter, just wants to connect with others like herself having been raised in a human’s world as a human.
• They go to the moon and begin their pre=training and testing.
• They are all the nerds of their denomination and are bullied.

Step 5. Creating my Chapters

The next step was to group those dot points into chapters. It did not stay in order as step 4 was about brain-dumping the events and step 5 was about organizing them. If you do this yourself, you may find you have just one dot point for a chapter, or perhaps several. Here is my original chapter list for “YOU”.

Step 6. Dot Pointing out the Chapters

Just as I dot-pointed the events for each section, next I dot-point the events within each chapter. I may write a similar post with one of my more recent books as I didn’t retain all of the planning steps with the first NUSA book.

Step 7. WRITE

And here we are. For me, writing meant turning on my mic and audacity, voice recording myself telling the story using the chapter dot points as a guide, and then running my audio through Dragon Naturally Speaking to transcribe to text.

Step 8. Keep going!

And that’s it. That’s how I built three words into a world.

Initial Planning Versus the Book

This is an interesting experience reflecting over NUSA because the original story circle outline ended up expanding out to cover four books. The dot-pointed section from “YOU” became an entire 60K word book on its own. The books were written from Jackon’s POV so I also created a ‘prequel’ to include the stories of each of the other unhuman kids getting their acceptance letters.

Just based on the initial dot points above for the “YOU” section, this is what changed in the story design:

• the program was renamed to the Natural Unhuman Space Academy
• They have a three-day intensive pre-training and selection process before heading to the moon for a 6-month training center
• There were 300 candidates
• Jackson was adopted by humans and is the youngest to ever be accepted into the first round of selections
• The rest pretty much stayed

NUSA Earth starts with Jackson finding out he is accepted and follows him to the initial training, meeting the other characters, and through to their launch to the Moon. The whole asteroid thing mentioned doesn’t happen until book four.

And all from ZOMBIES IN SPACE!