Is Your Story Idea Really Good Enough

It's 1 am and sure enough, you wake up with "an amazing idea for a story." You finally get back to sleep but you are now more than certain this will be the greatest novel ever! You are so excited, you are on social media and the phone talking to all of your critique partners about this novel.

But is it really worth it? Is this story "idea" something that can become a full novel?

The odds are, the story may not be strong enough. There is a pretty good chance that you are letting your emotions control your critical thinking skills.

There is only one way you can figure this out. It is time to start planning. Take the time to figure out the entire storyline. Figure out the Goals Motivations and Conflicts of the characters. Figure out the theme of the story and the message you want to tell. Even if you are someone who thinks you are a pantster, you need to plan this out. I am literally talking about planning this out almost chapter by chapter. Think of it this way:

You want to write an 80,000 word story. You want to shoot for 25 chapters. This means you need to be thinking about chapters around 3,200 words. Now, with this in mind, break out the Freytag Plot Diagram. 

This means that when you are hitting the rising action, you should be around chapter 3 or 4... Do you see where I am going with this? I know it sounds a bit scripted and many of you are thinking that this is far from being creative. Nope! You still have the creativity, you are just creating rough bench marks along the way to see if the story is going to work. 

If, after you have taken the time to do this, and it looks like it is possible, start. 

If you still think this is too time consuming, consider this. The odds are you will get easily a 1/3 of the way into the story when you finally see the story is not working for you. This means you have wasted the time you took to write those 8 chapters. This might be 8 solid days of writing if you are fast. It may be more days. I don't know about you, but I don't have that time to waste.