Thursday, September 16, 2021

Hey Presto, one example of how I prep...

For the ideas exercise I'm gonna use an idea that I've used before, but won't be writing...it's called project. The idea came to me when I lived in the states and saw the news about a train crash and thought

1. What would happen if a train crash was caused on purpose?

2. What if it was a cryogenics / stasis company illegally gaining subjects for their experiments?

3. What if I picked a young woman on that train as my main character? 

4. What was she doing on that train?

5. How was the accident caused? Was it an inside job? Did they have their own undercover medics/rescue teams?

The next step for me in writing this was to come up with the rest of the story, outline it if you will so I worked through the idea to the end (the outline of which I can no longer find but know that it's someplace). 

1. Suffice to say that the next thing I did in preparation for writing it was to create the antagonist as the idea had clearly indicated that an organisation was behind the crash, how could they have a team of first respondents to the site, and medics that no one would query? 

2. then it was time to come up with the protagonist and I landed on a young woman (most of my novel leads are female) I explored her life and why she was on the train, and how her family would react when she went missing. I decided that she was going to be unemployed, and heading for an interview, but she'd told no one, so the only way they had known she was on the train was through an entry in her diary (which I guess would be a laptop or tablet calendar now).

3. For me what came next was deciding how the world ended, because the cryo / stasis tubes needed to be buried, forgotten about (well almost). I decided on a war (it seemed logical at the time).

4. Next she needed someone to help her through this new world when she revived, so I created a gruff male character who would reluctantly help her, but who could double cross her on a whim.

5. As several years have passed and the world is in ruins, this needed to be researched (well as much as you could possibly do that snake bliskin is handy for that idea).

6. The organisation still exists, but now they are hunting the 'pod people', they are the elite, the ones in power, they send people out to find the pods as they have a rough idea that there are a few buried under several ruined cities. Initially I thought I would have them do it...for fun, but then I thought maybe there is something in the new dystopian world that the pod people don't have, maybe it's a virus of some kind and they need the clean pod people to rectify it...I don't think I quite worked through it. 

7. Our heroine, and the guide (we'll just call them that), head to the organisations headquarters reluctantly having bumped into the resistance 

8. I came up with the resistance, why they would have evolved, what they would want with her and how they would treat him...telling her that he is one of the organisations searchers, then sow the mistrust between them.

10. The idea is to destroy the organisation...


Now I don't think I finished this idea, which is why my focus is on other things, but as you can see this rough, rough full story outline is still pretty detailed enough to create chapter outlines (well at least possible outlines) from.

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