I get a lot of ideas. I’m not bragging, I’m just saying that—as a writer—ideas are always in abundance. Likewise, I can write dialogue all day long. Description, on the other hand, is more of a struggle. Says the, uh, bearded guy typing away on his, um, grey, rectangle-shaped word calculator computing device thingee.

I digress. It wasn’t unusual years ago for more to say, “I got this great idea for a story the other day.”

What I should have been saying was, “I got this great idea the other day.”

My point here is that ideas and stories aren’t the same thing.

An idea could be this: Sara drives an ice cream truck and uses her job to secretly hunt down demon Boogeymen who pose as little kids and prey upon young children.

That’s a nifty idea, but it’s not yet a story. I could start with that idea, give Sara a bad-ass nemesis, throw her through some hard knocks, crank out 5,000 words, and still not have a story. I’d just have a really long idea.

But let’s say that one of these Boogeymen killed Sara’s brother when they were young. Let’s say that she’s secretly resented her brother for dying, for leaving her to deal with their alcoholic mother and grow up alone. Let’s say that over the course of the story, she realizes that all these years, she hasn’t been chasing after Boogeymen; she’s been running away from her dead brother and hiding from her guilt to be the one who survived. When Sara fights not just the physical demons but the demons within, then, my friends, we have a story.

Call it a character arc. Call it inner conflict. Call it the antagonist within. Every good character has some flaw—some aspect of themselves—that they must overcome or alter in the course of resolving their outer conflict.

That’s story.

Later this week, I’m doing a presentation for 9^th grade students at the Dayton Regional STEM School. They’re about to embark on a new writing assignment, so I’m going to talk a bit about my writing process and share one of my favorite writing prompts.

Honestly, I don’t often use writing prompts in my fiction writing, but they can be a lot of fun. The premise for this charming little exercise is simple. You take a song or poem and write down its words in order—one word per line. Each word then becomes the first word of a new sentence.

So, for example, let’s take this excerpt from “Slow” by Leonard Cohen, a devilishly poignant tune:

I like to take my time
I like to linger as it flies
A weekend on your lips
A lifetime in your eyes

He’s just brilliant, isn’t he? Let’s hear the whole thing:

Okay, back to the exercise. So, we’ll use each of Cohen’s words as the the start of a new sentence, and try to make a coherent scene out of it. It’ll look something like the example below. I’ve bolded the words taken from “Slow” so you can see what I mean:

I sat in my room all last night listening to a ghost.
Like most everyone else, it only wanted to hear its own words.
To be honest, I didn’t care.
“Take your time,” I told it.
“My schedule’s all clear.”
“Time?” it answered.
“I don’t do time anymore.”
Like an itch, its voice lingered between my ears.
To my chest, I drew my knees.
“Linger with me,” I urged the ghost.
“As if I have a choice,” it answered.
It giggled.
Flies buzzed out of the room.
A ghost’s giggle is better seen than heard.
“Weekend nights are meant for better than this.”
“On most occasions, I would agree,” I said.
“Your apartment bores me,” it said.
Lips bit, I nodded my head.
A pause later, it said, “Though it looks familiar.
“Lifetime movies never made sense to me.”
In a moment, the new tenant walked in the door.
“Your new home,” the landlord said to the tenant.
Eyes passed through my companion and me, seeing all of the future and none of what had passed.

Shazam! Just like that, we have a 176-word flash fiction piece. Nifty, huh? You can approach this exercise in many ways:

1. Simply use it to make one poem out of another poem.
2. Challenge yourself to see if you can start and end a coherent story with these rather severe constraints.
3. Flesh out one of your characters a bit. Say you have a character who you’re trying to fully develop in a separate story. Figure out what her favorite song might be, and use the exercise above to craft a scene from her point of view. Odds are, you’ll discover something you didn’t know about her.

The point here is that words are magical things. They can act like seeds to grow still more words. And so from a song can a story grow.

My nine-year-old daughter wants to do two things when she grows up: 1) be an author; 2) work in an animal shelter. The other day, she told me that to be a successful writer, you have to start your story with something that gets the reader’s attention.

“You’re right,” I told her. “We call that hooking the reader.”

I recently took a couple weeks off from working on my Scary Tales series to crank out a couple short stories. In both cases, the first draft of each story had the same flaw (among a few others, of course): it started too early.

As writers beginning our stories, we need to know the full context of our characters as they meet the conflict that will drive the narrative. But guess what? Readers don’t. Readers need the conflict, and they need it fast! If you bog down those crucial early paragraphs with a bunch of backstory and description, you’ll lose your readers.

But here’s the thing: don’t focus on this too much in a first draft. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to start your story with a hook. Personally, I think it’s much better to start your story wherever you intuitively feel it begins. Finish the draft. Then, you can go back and see where your story REALLY begins. Odds are, it’ll be somewhere on page two or three, and that is where you should start the tale. And all that stuff that led up to it? You can sprinkle out whatever’s necessary throughout the story.

A great example of a snazzy hook is the first couple sentences of Horns by Joe Hill:

“Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby protuberances.”

Bam! I’m hooked. Aren’t you? We know right away that we have a troubled, hungover protagonist who has a pair of freakin’ horns on his forehead. Giddy-up! We don’t need to know yet all the details of what he did the previous evening. That can wait. We know he has horns, and we have a crap-ton of questions. Joe Hill, as usual, did his job well. He hooked us.

If you want to learn more about how to hook the reader, check out the classic book on writing by Les Edgerton called, appropriately enough, Hooked. It’s pound-for-pound, the best damn book on the craft I’ve ever read.

Last week, I wrote about the myth of writer’s block, and my mantra for the piece was these three words:

Just. Keep. Writing.

I thought this week I ought to expand on that a bit. Since I’m not an outliner, sometimes I get to a place in the story where I have no clue exactly what’ll happen next. I won’t lie. It can be a little scary.

The thing is, as writers we are lucky to work in such a measurable medium. Do sculptors have the luxury of measuring their output by pounds of clay? Painters by square inches of canvas? Dancers by steps?

Likely not, though I’m wholly tickled by the idea of a ballerina wearing a pedometer.

So, as writers, we are spoiled by our ability to measure our continuing success. But we can’t squander this blessing. Yes, we must make our daily word counts, even when we get stuck in the story. The best approach I’ve found for these moments isn’t to stay in front of the computer and grind out the rest of my daily words. No, I find more success (and less frustration) if I have the courage to walk away.

But wait. Courage? Wouldn’t it take more courage to stay and fight it out?

Not necessarily. The courage comes from having faith in your characters and your story—and having the resolve to come back to the computer after a few minutes of down time. See, I’m a big believer in the power of the subconscious to resolve story issues. If you have a solid story and realistic characters, then your problem will be resolved and your tale will be told. It might just need to simmer a bit in your head.

Sometimes you have to (or at least I have to) walk away for a little. For me, it helps to do something mindless like wash the dishes or even taking a walk. Engaging in these mundane tasks gives my body something to do while my mind chews on the story. I’m thinking about the narrative, but in a much more relaxed way than if I were still planted in front of the laptop. Of course, there’s a fine line between taking a healthy break to mull over a plot point and simply procrastinating.

You can walk away but you have to come back. You have to be committed to writing your daily words, even if it has to happen in a couple sittings. So, maybe a better mantra is:

Just. Keep. Writing. But sometimes stop and walk in a big circle.

Yeah. Not quite as catchy, huh?