The Returning Idea – The Climb #593

Wednesday 7^th October 2020

My ideas develop over time and a lot of the time it’s not even conscious.

I have an idea for a future book. It’s a strong hook and one I’ve talked about before, but today it visited me again.

At the heart of this is whether the idea works best as an epic fantasy or an urban fantasy. The last time it came round I worked on it as an epic fantasy, threw in a bunch of ideas and had a pretty solid concept for a novel.

But today I’ve been wondering about it more as an urban fantasy novel.

It’s possible that these two directions are so radically different that they are different books, but even so, I’m asking myself which concept works better.

The key to this is magic. All I will say is that the as-yet-undefined main character is a magic user. But are they a sole magic user in an otherwise normal world, or just another magical user in a world filled with magic. Those are two fundamentally different stories.

Taking my own advice here, the answer is probably going to be theme. Every story is a character journey and these two different directions are completely different character journeys.

Obviously I’m still thinking about it, and it’s possible that tomorrow I wake up and forget about it until some point in the future.

This isn’t a book I’m likely to really get to for years. At best it’s four books down the line. Whilst part of me thinks it might be a fun NaNoWriMo project, I suspect I’m going to be still working on rewriting a different book at that time.

Still, I like the idea of having a bunch of books done, if only in first draft, that I can quickly turn around if need. Being able to get ahead of myself so that when a book has to be done, a first draft is already done and sitting there, is a luxury that current me is thanking past me for. But I’ve done a lot of rewriting lately and whilst it stretches the same creative muscles and I’m loving what I’m working on, there’s part of me that would like to write something new for a change. Even if that means it sits for a few years awaiting a rewrite when it’s the book’s time.