New Concept Ideas – The Climb #559

Thursday 3^rd September 2020

Understandably, my mind has been removed from anything creative at the moment, instead remaining in a state of hyper-vigilance as I care for a burns victim while they recover. And because I’ve not had any active projects with deadlines, the fact I’ve not been creative has not been a bother. There’s no good time for these sorts of traumas to occur, but there could have been a lot of worse times.

But today I found my brain starting to want to create. Ideas are a weird thing. There are ways I can force them if needed, but there are those ideas that sidle into your mind like a stranger’s cat.

At this ‘stage’ of my career (if you can call it a career), I’m very much aware that some ideas are more commercial than others. I have stories I want to tell you that, currently, I’d need to sit you down over a beverage and explain to you. Then I have those stories that in a sentence or even a couple of words, can convey everything. It’s those ideas I find more commercial.

They’re the rarer ideas. I often refer to them as concepts. The Four Realms was a beautiful mix of traditional and urban fantasy, with a sprinkling of SF, and I love that novel for being so cross-genre, but commercially it’s a harder sell. Black as Knight on the other hand, is so much easier to describe, and taught me the benefit of these commercial ideas.

I’ve had another one. It’s only a seed of an idea and a sideways slant on another idea I had. It was sparked by those films that travel the world to unique and distinctive locations. In an age where leaving your house seems such an adventure the idea of having a story taking you to Rio, Paris and Mumbai seems to lavish. I question whether you could get that same feeling from fictional locations.

That in turn has given me an idea of the type of story I want to tell, but not the story itself. My default is always to go to the fantasy genre and add that spin to an idea… but the question right now is how? And how much?

How much of a modern aesthetic could I give a story before it stops being a fantasy novel and becomes an urban fantasy one? How much can you flesh out the direction of the idea before you lose the concept?

These are not questions I’m going to answer any time soon, and I’m happy with that. These ideas may linger for a few days and I’ll make a few notes but then they’ll get stuck in the ideas file and not be seen or thought about for a few years. At some point, it’ll either sidle back into my mind, or I’ll dig it out of the file to combine it with something I’m working on.