I met with a writer-friend the other night and spent a couple of hours, discussing plot.

This woman has wonderful characters with incredibly detailed backstories. She’s lived with the characters for six years or so. She has written thousands upon thousands of words, scene upon scene. She has three books wavering around in her head.

Her problem was that she didn’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end, for the book she’s presently working on. As she told me about the story, I saw a plot emerge. We determined that a story has to start with a character in conflict. That character has to want something. And someone or something has to stand in the character’s way.

The easy way to do a plot is to have the character work toward her goal, and fail. She can plan and fail and land in worse shape, over and over, until she finally has learned enough along the way to defeat the foe and achieve her goals. If she is, at that time, tempted to turn back the story will be even stronger than if she defeats her foe without any inner struggle. The black night of the soul makes the climax all the better. If the protagonist sacrifices something she wants, in order to serve the greater good, we will cheer.

This is a very easy plot to work with.

But my friend didn’t have this kind of story. Her story pulled me along because there were so many questions I wanted answered. But in the middle of the book my friend lost her grip on the story. One reason for this is that the conflict the character faces at the beginning of the book does not have anything to do with the conflict she faces at the climax.

There is a reason for this. At the beginning of the book the character doesn’t know who she is. She can’t know what she’s working for as her big goal, because she has woken up with amnesia. So her first conflict is that she doesn’t know who she is and the story is very interesting because of all the mystery that surrounds her.

My friend and I discussed the plot and we decided that the character has to figure out who she is and then she has to take off on the new goal. She has to have a new conflict. Once she remembers who she is, she has to go to work trying to defeat the problem she had before she lost her memory.

It will work.

Not all stories have to be written like a hero’s journey. Not all protagonists have to hear and heed the call to adventure. Not at the beginning, anyway. Or you might have several smaller calls to smaller adventures, before you get to the one adventure that will carry you to the climax.

All that matters is that the story is interesting.

But it’s nice to know that no matter what kind of story we have, if we get lost, we can always look at what we have, and we can plug in elements we know we need—desire, conflict, plans, set-backs, and finally success—and bring the book back on track.

Where do you get your ideas for the books you write? That’s a question every author gets and one that often frustrates them. Many don’t know where they got the idea for a particularly story? Do we remember three years later, when we finish the fourth draft, where the germ of the original idea came from? And when we compare the fourth draft to the first, how can tell when the final idea took root out of the mess that was the first draft?

A story idea is not a static thing that lights up like a bulb above your head. It’s a seed that falls to the ground and dies and comes popping out of the soil of the imagination as a fresh shoot, and keeps on growing and changing and maturing, until you have a full-grown oak tree that looks nothing like the little acorn you started with. When does the acorn become a tree? When does AN idea become THE IDEA for that particular story?

And if the one asking the question is asking something more generic, such as, “Where do you get ideas for any story, not for one particular story?” that’s no easier to answer, really.

I brainstorm, but I admit, I’m not one of those writers who has ideas bulging out her brain and who can’t find enough time to write them all. Ideas are hard for me to come by. I have to shake the trees a long time to get even one acorn to fall.

I have given two speeches at the new Toastmasters club I joined last month and I’m hard-pressed to come up with an idea for a third. Blog posts come no more easily. I stare at the screen and struggle to find something to write about. Same with short stories. I’d like to enter several short story contests and submit to a few children’s magazines, but I can’t come up with ideas.

Rebecca LuElla Miller tells us that story ideas are everywhere. And I agree with that. She goes on to say there is a bit of a trick in discovering which ideas will be interesting to write about.

And that, I think, is what children want to know when they ask authors during school visits, “Where do you get your ideas?” I think they want to know how to bring their passions to the page. Of course there are ideas everywhere, but they don’t all make a good story idea. They won’t all make interesting speeches.

What we need is passion.

On one wall in my living room there is a picture of elephants running, on another wall the Château de Chillon. My mother sits in one chair watching TV, my sister lies on the loveseat with a book. I’m on the couch with earphones in, listening to Apocalyptica and blogging. There are bookshelves bulging with clutter, lamps, a fan, several computers, a tea-cup, and a floor that needs to be vacuumed.   Hmm. None of these inspire me to write a story about them.

The Château de Chillon has some promise. I was there when I was six. I remember a toilet there, it looked like an outhouse seat, but the hole was a chute that went all the way down to the lake, and I remember seeing Lord Byron’s signature carved into the post in the dungeon. And I actually put some of those memories into a novel I’ve written. But does the castle give me an idea for a story?

It gave Lord Byron an idea.

What we need is a character. We need a character who wants something. A character who can’t have what he wants. A prisoner who couldn’t get free, a prisoner who lost all of nature and all his family, found his way into Lord Byron’s mind and burst out in a poem, after Byron looked at the dungeon at the château.

Stories are about people. Maybe the people in the stories are robots or toasters or bunny rabbits, but they are people still. All stories are about people.

I guess all I can say for sure about ideas right now: They have to be about people in some kind of trouble.

Where do you get your ideas?

I was thinking about metaphors and similes and idioms the other day. Clichéd phrases work as a kind of shorthand. When we hear them, we don’t even think about what they are literally. We think about what they mean.

Take this one: I want to kill two birds with one stone.

When we hear that, we know the speaker doesn’t really want to kill two sweet little birds. He’s simply saying he wants to maximize his return on his investment.

I like to take clichés and breathe fresh life into them by changing the terms. So the other day I was writing to a friend and I changed “kill two birds with one stone,” to, “kill two baby seals with one club.”

Eeeeee-ewwwww I quickly deleted that. Talk about putting a gruesome picture into someone’s mind. It says the same thing as killing two birds with one stone, and it breathes new life into a cliché. But at what cost? I would have stopped my reader dead, filling her mind with the picture of cute baby seals being clubbed.

This isn’t the case with the birds, because we don’t think about birds at all when someone says he wants to kill two of them with one stone.

So is it better to use the tired old phrases? I would not use the cliché or the shocking new idiom involving baby seals. I think we should go for something new that is not disgusting. How can we say we want to get two things done at one time?

How about:

• Bake two pies in one oven.
• Cross two rivers with one bridge.

Or maybe those are like giving an old woman a face lift when she really needs a whole body makeover. I don’t know. What do you think? How can we spiff up this cliché? When you’re writing, do you cut clichés completely or look for ways to rephrase them, keeping the idea intact? Have you got any favorites you want to share (either your own or someone else’s)?

Sometimes, when I’m honest, I admit that I prefer saying I have written over I am writing. Worse still is, I should be writing.

Writing is not all that easy. Not for me. Not first drafts, certainly.

I have accountability partners who demand a chapter a week from me. I haven’t turned in a chapter in two weeks now. Yikes. But what are they going to do to me? It’s not like they can take away some nonexistent paycheck. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough integrity to care that my good name is being ruined. Who cares if I’ve gained a reputation for being a slacker among group after group of accountability partners? So I’m always on the lookout for new ways to spur myself on to writing painful rough draft.

I searched for a meter to put on my blog so I could see my progress and be motivated, and when I had a hard time finding one, I made my own word-count meter and loaded it on my site so others could nab it, too, if they wanted. If that will motivate you, have at it.

We had a little discussion on one of my email loops the other day (CCWL). Someone had just come from a writers’ conference where a speaker said she hung one monkey, from a Barrel of Monkeys game, every time she completed 2000 words. When the barrel was empty, her book was done. “What might be more motivating than monkeys?” Stephenie asked. She thought maybe colored paperclips would be a nice visual reminder of progress made. Or a string of Christmas lights, where you could add one light for every couple of thousand words.

I suggested jingle bells, which are pretty and inexpensive, or maybe crystals, hung in a sunny window for bigger chunks of text (they cost a bit more).

Sue thought quarters in a jar would provide motivation for writing her children’s novels and short stories, because you could spend the quarters later.

Ah, my greedy little ears perked right up. Why shouldn’t I pay myself for writing? No one else is paying me. But quarters are not quite enough to spur me on. If I write one chapter a week and I pay myself a quarter per chapter…nine months later I’ll get to spend nine dollars. Oh, yeah. We can really party down on nine bucks.

Clearly, quarters would not do it for me.

Ten dollar bills, I thought, would provide much more writer motivation than quarters. Stephenie added that if they were in a clear glass container, we could look at them and be encouraged to write, write, write.

So, I went to the second-hand store to shop for neat glass bottles. I decided to go with a pitcher with coins in it, holding up a narrow vase where the tens shall go. I borrowed some money from my rich mother to take the picture, because, alas, the poor vase is quite empty at present. But…I plan to rectify that soon.

What about you? What motivates you to write? Some of you skinny people bribe yourselves with the promise of ice cream sundaes for rewards, I bet. Tell me about it. I’ll just sit here drooling all over my keyboard. No big deal. 

There is a difference between message-driven fiction, and fiction that leads readers to discover a message. One drives and the other…well…leads. Which would you prefer: having someone stand behind you, poking you with a cattle prod, or having someone stand in front of you, holding out a carrot big bowl of ice cream?

Both will get you moving in the right direction, but they aren’t equally good ways to motivate people. The prodding sets up a situation where life becomes unbearable and you have to move forward to get away from the irritant. The ice cream allows you to stay where you are if you really want to, but it offers you a tasty reward if you’ll do a little work.

I, being  a mother, see benefits in both of these motivational methods. Sometimes a lazy child will not move no matter how wonderful the reward, so you must needs make his life miserable. As an author, though, I think prodding is never the right way to go. Is a reader going to choose a book that prods him with a lecture or a book that offers him the tasty reward of discovering some great truth for himself?

On Monday, Sarah Sawyer posted Faith in Fantasy: Part 2, in which she discussed the differences between Tolkien and Lewis. Both believed that “fantasy lent itself to the expression of spiritual truth,” Sawyer tells us. But Lewis depicted ”more distinct, overt Christian elements” than Tolkien did.

Then Mike Duran gave us The Problem with “Message-Driven” Fiction, on Tuesday.

So this stuff—the “message in fiction” deal—is once again on my mind, and I thought I’d post on it, because this is important for Christian writers but it’s also important for children’s writers.

Children’s writers, like Christian writers, seem to fall into two camps—those that want to put in blatant messages and those that don’t think we should ever deliver answers, rather we should only ask questions and let the readers find their own answers.

I have discussed Katherine Paterson’s excellent mode of preaching in fiction at length here and here. In that second post—Lessons (L)earned—the point I made six years ago is one I still believe. We can push any agenda as long as the answers are “earned” by the characters, rather than given to them by a heavy-handed author.

The problem with “message-driven” fiction is not that there is a message. Fiction needs a message unless you are trying to write mindless drivel that is on the shelf and off again in two weeks. Message is fine. The problem comes when the message drives the characters rather than letting the characters find it and decide to follow it of their own free will.

In my comment on Sarah’s site, I said:

Preaching is OK with me if it’s done well. I think if you want to preach, the characters must be looking for answers and finding those answers as the result of much labor and hardship on their part. Then when they grasp the truth the reader grasps it with them and it all feels earned. It feels like the prize at the end of a tough race.

What happens in too many Christian books, unfortunately, is that we have one surly, angry-at-God character and someone lectures him on how he needs to be saved by the blood of Christ and low and behold the surly character sees the light and is saved. Hallelujah, Amen! That kind of story doesn’t allow the reader to participate with the character in his struggle and growth.

This kind of stuff doesn’t happen in children’s books too much, because the overtly didactic books aren’t published. But if you’ve read many self-pubbed chidlren’s books or done much critiquing, you’ll know that this is a huge temptation for those who want to write and publish children’s books. Based on the manuscripts I’ve read over the years, I’d guess that for many of us, our first inclination is to write books in which an adult, or a know-it-all child tells the hero what he needs to learn.

That’s no good.

Don’t do that.

What do you think? How can we lead readers to discover the lessons we want them to learn, without making them feel like we’re jolting them with a cattle prod to make them go a certain direction?

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This post was featured in the August 2011 Carnival of Children’s Literature hosted at Great Kid Books.