Random ideas and why every writer should love them!

As you can guess by the title, I’ve had some fun plotting for Light. Or should I call it subplotting?

Be that as it may, it never ceases to amaze me how randomly I seem to get ideas for my writing. I suppose all of you have some sort of favorite place to muse and get ideas for your writing. For me that would probably be my bed or oddly enough the shower But then again it’s those random situations that I’m in and my mind just suddenly snaps, coming up with some random idea that I know I have got to write down, because heyyyy it’s briiiiiliant.

And in the end, that’s all your plot comes down to: some random idea that you dwell on for quite a while, pieced together with other random ideas. The best part about it is that you always can add on to those ideas (which is what we’d call subplot). And sometimes this happens quite automatically by adding another character. I recently read an article on Nathan Bransford’s blog about character and plot being inseparable and I guess it’s pretty self-evident. Whenever you add a character to your story, this character comes with a background, a motivation, a relationship to other characters whether they are main characters or merely supportive cast.

I made that kind of experience by adding Damian as a second first person point of view, in other words, making him my second main character next to Ares. So since Ares’ plot was already laid out in the first draft of Shadows, Damian was involved as one of the main characters, but now that he has his own PoV he is contributing much more details and his own plot lines which make the overall story so much more complex. Let alone he helps to clear up some potentially confusing bits and pieces.

With that I’m off with a writerly squee of awesome to work some new ideas into upcoming chapters. This is when editing is fun