“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”

~ Neil Gaiman

Character or plot? That’s the writer’s equivalent of the philosopher’s chicken/egg dilemma, and it evokes the same questions about the beginning of life and the nature of the universe. Only instead of our real universe, we are pondering the universe of a story.

For me, building a novel’s universe–the physical and magical laws that make it work, the landscapes within it, and the people who walk those landscapes–usually begins with an image from a dream, a moment, or a photograph. I may remember only that one visual. Nothing else. We all do that. Every person in America, in the world, has a story idea, or a script idea, or a sit com idea. Of course, some are better than others:

• Stephanie Meyer’s dreamed of sparkly vampires.
• Mary Shelly dreamed of a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” the thing that became Frankenstein.
• Robert Louis Stephenson dreamed up the situation for his “schilling-shocker,” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by seeing Hyde take the powder and undergo the transformation in front of witnesses.
• Sue Monk Kidd, began her SECRET LIFE OF BEES based on a single image of “bees that lived inside a bedroom wall and flew out at night.”
• Jacquelyn Mitchard, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and many other writers have all described images or dreams that sparked either a first or subsequent novel.

It’s what happens after that first idea that separates the writer from the hack.

The image, dream, or idea is only the beginning. Even full dream sequences make no real sense. We have to craft stories around them, populate them with living, breathing, fascinating, real characters who have unique problems that, at the same time they are fresh and different, lead with seeming, unputdownable inevitability, one misstep at a time, to an astonishing conclusion.

As Gaiman further puts it, “dream logic isn’t story logic. Transcribe a dream, and you’ll see. Or better yet, tell someone an important dream -‘Well, I was in this house that was also my old school, and there was this nurse and she was really an old witch and then she went away but there was a leaf and I couldn’t look at it and I knew if I touched it then something dreadful would happen…’ – and watch their eyes glaze over.” (Sort of, you know, the same look your family gets when they ask you what your story is about and you tell them.)

The magic of the writing process isn’t in the first idea. It’s in the sweat-making, hair-pulling, mind-bending stage where you take that single image or idea and twist it, shape it, add to it until you have a complete concept and a universe in which that concept breathes.

So what’s the difference between a concept and an idea?

According to many different experts, the concept gives you the whole story recipe. Depending on who you listen to, it contains a mix of the following:

• The fascinating character
• The interesting setting
• The inherent conflict
• The inciting incident
• The high stakes
• The twist
• The coolness factor
• The hook the reader can relate to or think about
• The great title that draws the reader in