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A weekly column from children’s author Simon Rose

NOTE: For the month of February, Simon Rose has focused on where ideas come from and how writers turn them into stories.

For a writer, having ideas in some ways is the easy part. If all that was needed was a good idea, everyone would be a writer. What takes time, dedication and effort is actually turning these ideas into stories.

You may have the general premise, but it must be able to sustain the reader’s interest for over a hundred and fifty pages or even three hundred or more for YA, teens or adults. You have to sit down and think about it, determining if it is actually feasible as a story.

I have a lot of ideas that may never become full blown stories, but I always keep a record of them, since you never know when you might get another piece of the puzzle. On several occasions, I have had part of the story, but haven’t been able to put my finger on some element that would make the plot work really well. Then one day, something comes to you out of the blue, an overheard conversation, a song on the radio, when you are working on some other story entirely and so on. Keep everything you get as an idea, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time. Create ideas files, either on paper or on the computer, character names you like the sound of, even if you don’t have a story yet to put them in, a title for a story or whatever it may be. Keep notepads handy, or even use a voice recorder, if you have ideas while driving.

And remember, not all ideas make a novel either, since some may be only suited to short stories, pictures books or even poems. Some ideas may turn out to be separate stories, as happened with The Alchemist’s Portrait and The Sorcerer’s Letterbox, which became two different books. If your dog or cat does something amusing, and this may seem fascinating to you, your family and friends, you have to ask yourself not only if this is sustainable as a story, but if people would actually want to read about it. That being said, writing what you know can be a lot easier too, if you are not prepared to do lots of research into a totally fresh topic.

Perhaps you are a dog owner. Or are into sailing, rock climbing, hiking or antique vehicles. Do you have an interesting hobby or occupation? Or do you own property that has been in your family for several generations and has spooky stories attached to it? Creating a story about what you know, admittedly with embellishments as you build the plot, is still easier than starting from scratch. And even if it is a totally fresh idea, make sure that you really like the premise, since you will be immersed in the writing, editing and revising while you live in that world for months, or even years, at a time.

A weekly column from children’s author Simon Rose

NOTE: For the month of February, Simon Rose will focus on where ideas come from and how writers turn them into stories.

As a writer, I often find myself wondering “what if.” This in itself can lead to many story ideas, some of which may end up being more developed than others.

What if there were a letter in your mailbox, inviting you to attend a school for wizards?

Or if one night a flying boy dressed in green appeared at your window with an invitation to accompany him to a magical realm?

Or you discovered another universe at the back of your closet?

Or followed a white rabbit down a hole into another dimension?

This might not have been how the famous stories of Harry Potter, Peter Pan, The Chronicles of Narnia or Alice in Wonderland actually came about, but these “what ifs” demonstrate how the writer’s mind can work simply from the starting point of “what if”?

Ideas can, of course, also be generated from your own influences, either from childhood or things from later in life. I became immersed in science fiction as a boy. The original Star Trek series springs readily to mind, along with other TV shows of the time, and I also read a lot of science fiction novels and collections of short stories, as well fantasy writers. I also read a tremendous number of comic books as a child. Pure escapism perhaps, but comic books were great for the imagination. I leapt headfirst into those tales of superheroes in what was probably the golden age of comic books in the 1960’s. The stories took me across the universe, into strange dimensions, into the land of the Norse gods or had me swinging from the New York rooftops.

At high school, I studied a great deal of history, retaining my interest in the subject up to the present day and historical events and personalities have certainly served as an inspiration for some of my novels for children. Sometimes I have used real stories and characters, as in The Sorcerer’s Letterbox, which is based on the true story of Richard III and the Princes in the Tower of London, or sometimes just utilized the setting of medieval England at the time of the Black Death, as in The Heretic’s Tomb. In The Alchemist’s Portrait, Matthew’s time travel adventures take him Amsterdam in 1666, the French Revolution, the American Civil War and the Russian Revolution. My upcoming novel, The Doomsday Mask, features the legend of the lost city of Atlantis, mysterious artifacts from ancient civilizations, the Pleistocene Extinction and the chaos of Berlin in 1945.