Brainstorming
“I have an idea but I don’t know where to go from here.”
“I’ve always wanted to write and idk where to start.”
“I just have all these scenes but I’m not sure what comes next.”
ALRIGHT
I am blessed to have never had this problem. I’m not sure if it was the V8 I drank as a kid or the fact I was in the library so much the sweet lil old lady behind the counter knew me by name BUT IT DOES NOT MATTER.
Because EVERYONE who has tried thinking out loud has had it work for them. EVERYONE. So THINK OUT LOUD and see what happens.
Brainstorming is my favorite part of the process.
(Don’t tell the other parts of the process, because I lie to them and tell them they are my favorite parts. But brainstorming is really my favorite part. (Or is she? Time will certainly tell.))
When approaching Project STARDUST I knew three things off the bat:
It had to be a standalone
It had to be fantasy (I do write in multiple genres, believe it or not, but people have worldbuilding questions, so fantasy it is)
It had to be good enough to be a passion project
When I started brainstorming, I soon found out #4: I wanted enemies-to-lovers.
Thinking out loud has become my brand on the internet, and I’m not ashamed of that! It’s the best way to think. I frequently act like I’m in The Office, and I treat my camera like an audience waiting for me to figure out a puzzle. It helps speed things along.
If I’m really struggling, I’ll force myself to figure it out in 10 minutes. (This goes for plot holes too, but we won’t hit those until later).
Project STARDUST took me 33 minutes of footage to nail down. I cut the video 4 different times to pace around my house in contemplation.
The highlight reel is on my TikTok, and the full footage is on my Youtube. (I did cut out long pauses and my excessive use of “um" (that’s okay you don’t have to thank me <3))
What I found most interesting about this project was how much I hated it. I despised it. No matter what I did, I felt like nothing was working.
On Youtube, you’ll see at 7 mins in I quite literally quit. I considered coming up with something else (or returning to something I’d already brainstormed before).
But something made me start a new video. Something made me erase the board and start from scratch, using only the idea that our FMC was a starcatcher as a bouncing off point.
And after that, once I found that the star catcher and the star cutter were not the same person, I was fine.
Off the bat, I was boxing my FMC into a corner by making her too many things at once. Did I realize this? Of course not. But now that I have the idea down, I can’t imagine her doing both the star catching & star cutting.
It’s all part of the learning process.
Allow your characters and plot to be what they want to be. They gotta breathe, and they can’t if you suffocate them with your good-intentions.
Approaching Project STARDUST
Follow my writing and publishing journey:
a biblically-accurate portrait of me