Ideas or Execution?

I believe one of the questions most asked of novelists is “Where do you get your ideas?” Or “How did you come up with that?”

If some of us are honest, we say, “I have no idea.”

But since we’re writers, we might mess with someone and not offer a direct answer. “In the southern part of downtown, there’s a little shop that sells these things for $0.10 for twelve of them.”

My point is, ideas come, but the execution of those ideas makes gold or silver.

Ideas are important, but making those ideas come to life and defined by your vision is the main part of writing a story.

The part that is not negotiable is finishing the stories.

Some of our ideas will have people wondering what drugs we’re smoking. I’m proud to say I do nothing of the sort. Everyone has his or her own process, though. Stephen King once remarked he wrote Cujo blitzed out of his mind on cocaine. But it doesn’t take drugs to come up with abstract events and concepts all neatly linked to form a story.

I have a story coming up where you find a woman who grants you working organs because of a disease that occurred from a passing comet she rides on like a chariot by entering a lost oil painting of Avalon in the middle of a doctor’s office. And the United States is under the authority of a chess-obsessed president who was never elected in the same story.

It’s strange, but it’s the execution that makes or breaks the story.

Building on those ideas, using our power as writers to add subtext and nuance to the story is one of the fun parts of doing this.

In A Knight Stained Black, our first introduction to Latta Wickasil in Avalon goes something like this:

Kyle followed, walking past the tree line with a pep in his step, unlike any motivation he had ever had before, seeing as this contact of Mare’s was the key to Serenity’s survival. He wanted to strike himself, to punch himself in the face and wake up from this impossible experience. But everything felt real enough, and if that was the case, it was real. Soon, the island’s mists cleared. The sky made of crystallized twilight dimmed itself down three notches, perhaps four if you looked at it closely. And the forest became an ended void of the inkiest black with only the weakest light inset in the overwhelming gloom. Thereupon, in this gloom, sat a chair in the distance—which moved further away as they got closer and came closer as they moved further away—formed from mahogany wood with the care of an expert craftsman. But on the chair sat a woman in all her dim-lit splendor.

She was smiling at Kyle, her dark face set alight now coming into view. It was pale, yet bright. She had piercing amber eyes, which both glowed like the midnight eye of Orion and faded out like an ancient coffin set in the ground on a moonless night. Impossibility herself sat before him. Her clothing was as black as the surrounding void, yet as glittering as the sun at the highest of noons. She had draped a black and white umbrella over her right shoulder, and on her left sleeve, sat a beating golden heart, in synchronization with Kyle’s own heart as he took each step further away to draw himself closer to her. Every time his heart took a beat, the golden organ took its own. She had a smile like the last glint of the sun before nightfall, full of hope and something extinguished simultaneously. Her nose was slightly crooked in the best of ways. Her attire was at once both highly conservative and covering, yet incredibly liberal and revealing. She had a most feminine form, and an aura like that of a strongman. Her dress was at once striped and plain, and her leggings were straight-ironed and wrinkled together in a moment of existence from beyond the recesses of all that was in the moment, or many moments all happening at once. Whichever could resolve itself into a paradoxical equation that had no answer.

The idea is impossibility.

That much is clear from this text.

But the way we execute showing the impossible is where the treasure is hidden. How would I describe the idea of impossible? That’s what I asked myself when writing that passage to describe a being that can’t truly be understood. Avalon (an impossible place from myth) is just as impossible as her existence, yet the characters are there, so we must take the idea of impossible and describe it as best as we can.

While ideas may come in waves, it’s how we put it all together to form something with identity and recognition that makes the story work.

I want countless amazing ideas, but I want to execute just one of those ideas in the right way.