Where It All Begins – Spark
Most writing advice explains craft in pieces: character, conflict, world building, plot, theme.
In this series, I’m doing something different. I’m taking one novel from its first spark of an idea and building it step by step, showing how those pieces actually interact in practice.
The example is an M/M romantic fantasy that begins with a very simple premise: a prince falls in love with a necromancer.
Let’s see how to turn an idea into a novel.
Instead of writing yet another dry article series about what the three-act structure is, or how to create a fantastic character out of nothing, I’m going to show you how these theoretical steps can actually be applied in practice.
This series isn’t only for writers, but for anyone who creates stories, because the creative process is essentially the same in every case. Only the medium in which it takes shape is different.
In the first article, we’ll talk about the idea, the spark that sets the whole process in motion. About how a passing thought grows into a story.
A few words about me.
I’ve been writing and editing for ten years, and I’ve also been working as a freelance editor since 2024. More than thirty of my short stories have been published online, I’ve published a novel and a novella, and I also have several novels in progress. Some are still little more than mountains of notes, while others are already complete manuscripts.
The Spark
Where does an idea come from?
An idea can come from anywhere. Something can appear while you’re reading, watching a movie, going for a walk, or even cooking, and then refuse to leave you alone. Or it can happen during a conversation. In a dream.
The spark can be:
- an image;
- a line of dialogue;
- a character;
- a relationship dynamic;
- a magical concept;
- a question;
- an atmosphere.
A thought, a situation that stays with us and occupies our mind for some reason.
I have an idea that started while I was sitting on a bus reading an article. At some point, I realized I wasn’t paying attention to the words anymore because I was thinking, “What if…?”
Another idea came from misreading my notes while studying for my final law exams, because my handwriting is so beautiful that even I can’t read it. There is a criminal offense called Changing the Placement of a Minor. One element of the definition says: “or keeps them hidden.” And what did I read instead? “Keeps them in a mirror.” ( which only makes sense in Hungarian since the Hungarian word for hidden is titokban, and mirror is tükör).
Those words set my imagination running: keeps them in a mirror. By now they have grown into a four-book series in which mirror magic and children trapped inside a mirror dimension play a major role.
Yet another idea appeared while I was out walking. It went something like: “What if I took Mushu from Mulan, traumatized him even more, and gave him to a smuggler who also happens to hate dragons, except the two of them can’t get rid of each other?” We’ll leave aside what that idea eventually grew into, because that could be an entire article series on its own…
I also have stories that were born from prompts. A writer friend and I used various outside prompts, a piece of dialogue, a situation, half a sentence, and each of us wrote a short story using the same starting point.
And of course, sometimes a story develops over years, and you can no longer say exactly how the whole thing started. It simply lives in your head. That’s how my The Soul Rune book series came to be.
The spark I’ll be using throughout this article series is a romantic fantasy novel that is, in several ways, perfect as an example.
What makes an idea worth developing?
Not every idea is strong enough to carry an entire story. Sometimes it needs to be refined, sometimes it merges with another idea, and sometimes it takes on a completely different form from the one it originally had.
Years ago, I had a spark. An ordinary guy who can see ghosts and helps them cross over into the afterlife. I twisted and turned Shiva’s story for a very long time, trying to put together a novel, but no matter what I did, it never came together. I put it aside because I liked the idea. The individual elements were good. In 2023, a prompt pushed me to write my first horror short story, whose main character was a ghost. That was the story in which Shiva’s idea took on an entirely new form. Now, instead of telling what happened to him through a linear novel, I tell his story through short stories written from the ghosts’ points of view. The thread connecting those stories is Shiva’s ability and his own story.
Now let’s move on to the spark that forms the backbone of this article series.
There was a prompt: “The spell would only hide her for so long.”
That gave me the idea for a necromancer, but the short story was never finished. The spark wasn’t enough. But I had a character.
Like most writers, I read a lot. Mostly in the same genres I write in. So I was reading. And at some point I realized that I needed a prince, a warrior, who falls in love with someone. An enemies-to-lovers story.
Okay, but who could be the enemy the prince falls in love with? The necromancer, obviously.
And while we’re at it, we need dragons and vampires too, because why not?
I had two ideas. Neither of them was enough on its own to be worth developing, but together they caught fire, and within moments a story began to take shape.
Clearly, sometimes an idea is too small to carry an entire story and needs another spark beside it before everything comes together.
It can also happen that an idea is too complex to become a simple story. In that case, we either strip it down and look for its core, or we let it grow until it becomes an epic story. Whichever path we choose, the important thing is that by the end, it becomes a cohesive, consistent story. (Of course, obsessive people like me can turn even the simplest idea into something epic. See my Mushu idea.)
To sum it up: there is no such thing as a bad idea. There are imperfect ideas, but part of the creative process is refining them during the planning stage until they become what they need to be.
An idea can come from anywhere, and anything can provide inspiration. A spark might flicker for years inside a forgotten file or notebook, but sooner or later, it can be brought to life.
Now that we have our spark, a prince falls in love with a necromancer, let’s move on. In the next article, we’ll dig into what it actually takes to turn that into a story, in this case, a novel. In other words, we’ll look at conflict.
Thank you for reading!
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