Finding an Idea for Your Novel that Actually Works
Finding the right idea – and the right way in
Very often when I tell someone that I’m an editor and literary agent, they respond by telling me that they have a great idea for a novel, if only they had the time to sit down and write it.
If you are reading this, chances are that you are writing a novel, and so you know that the way to find the time to sit down to write said novel is both as simple and as difficult as that: you just have to find the time, whether that is getting up early, writing on your phone in your lunchbreak, or giving up doomscrolling to free up time (delete as appropriate).
That part of the claim, then, is generally easily refuted. The other part – that they have a great idea for a novel – is trickier. Who wants to be told that the idea they have for a novel – surely a bestseller just as soon as they find that elusive time to type it out – is bad? But in my experience, their ideas are always bad (perhaps this is why, subconsciously, they have never found the time to write them).
Recently someone told me their great idea was to write the life of an incredibly ordinary man, someone who did nothing of particular import in their life to set them apart from others. Wouldn’t that be a point of difference, they exclaimed, to have a novel about someone objectively uninteresting? Other times people tell me their ideas and they are barely a germ of an idea: a story told backwards, instead of forwards; an impossible crime; a narrative where the narrator isn’t who you think they are.
None of these are necessarily bad ideas – I could list numerous books already fitting the description – but they aren’t fully formed yet. Even if the writer were gifted with the time to sit and write the novel, they don’t really have an idea yet.
So here are some tips on actually coming up with an idea, and developing it until there is enough there that you can truly say you have an idea for a novel. Whether you are starting from scratch, want to develop a germ of an idea you already have, or simply want to test the project you’re working on, here is how I both develop new ideas to propose to authors, and the questions I use when considering the ideas or outlines authors propose to me.
