Where Do Your Ideas Come From? The Dramatic Ending
The question I get most often as a science fiction and fantasy author is: Where do you come up with your ideas? This article is the 9th in a daily series for Medium, analyzing the thought-by-thought process of coming up with the ideas for the daily fantasy blog about the girl who lives in her father’s dreams, The Squashbuckler Diaries.
Today’s Idea: The Background
Today’s article is based on the 200th Squashbuckler Diary entry here. Here’s a little bit of context: Joy Shelley is 5 years old and has always grown up in her father’s dream. He raises her only when he’s asleep. When he’s awake, she’s alone.
They live on a flying pirate ship and have adventures. The villains they capture and, for a mysterious reason, stay behind even when her father is gone, are imprisoned in an infinite prison in the belly of the ship.
Since Joy is alone most of the day, she befriends the villains. Some consider her like their daughter (General Hawk in this case) and others hold a grudge (the Evil Fairy Forest King). The overall story is about Joy Shelley, a little girl who grows up in her father’s dreams.
In the last few posts, the Forest King got into Joy’s mind and sowed doubt by getting her worried that something will happen to her father. It worked. General Hawk then threatened him, but the threats were hollow since he is imprisoned in another cell.
In this post, I wanted the Forest King to dig deeper into Joy’s mind and increase the doubt. He would have to do it within earshot of General Hawk, who would, in the next post, be forced to find a way to kill the Forest King.
That’s the background. Here’s how it came out.
Writing it was easy and didn’t require a lot of imagination. Almost everything within the post was predetermined by the previous posts. I was just technically taking the characters through the various stages: A step by step of the Forest King finding his way into Joy’s weak spot. Simultaneously, for each step the Forest King took, General Hawk got more and more threatening.
All of that was technical. I’ve done a step-by-step hundreds of times by now, so it came easily.
The new thing I wanted this article to be about is the end, which was unplanned.
“You’re dead,” General Hawk whispers to the Fairy King, to which he then answers, “She already is.”
Since she lives in a world of adventure, it is quite possible that self doubt will indeed cause her death, and so, the storyteller, The Red Dragon, who listens from afar, seconds that notion and says “I was afraid he was right.”
That dramatic ending is what I want to talk about. How does that happen?
Where do your ideas come from? — The dramatic ending
Paranoia isn’t fun, but paranoid thinking is really good for writers. Here’s why.
The questions that lead to the most dramatic moments are:
- What’s the worst thing that could happen now?
- What’s the worst timing for X to happen?
- Who is the worst person X could happen to?
These are basically the building blocks of both drama and comedy. If you think about your favorite movies, books, or TV shows, the best parts always fall into those categories. And it’s not just the big moments, it’s also the smallest ones.
If it’s your first day in a job you can’t afford to lose, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Your alarm doesn’t go off, for example.
If you’re Ally McBeal and you talk about someone in the bathroom behind his back, what’s the worst thing that could happen? He could be in the stall next to you.
If you’re a world class surgeon, what’s the worst thing that could happen to you? You could have a car accident and lose your ability to operate.
And so on, endlessly, for each piece of dramatic work that exists.
So my mind is always trained, without even thinking, to go to the worst thing that could happen. In this case, it did so immediately, as Joy’s doubt grew bigger and bigger. My mind automatically went to the worst thing that could happen: The doubt would spread, she would make mistakes in battle, and she would die without her father’s dream being able to protect her in time.
And that was how that ending came to be.
Join me tomorrow as I tackle how I’m going to get General Hawk to kill the Forest King from inside his cell (I don’t know yet). And do check out the previous articles in this series.
