Kairos Progress: It Begins.

On September 8th, 2017, I finished the first rough draft of Kairos and published the last epilogue chapter to Wattpad. Which means it's time to edit. Cue ominous chord here.

I've been looking forward to editing Kairos pretty much since day one. While I've always had a set ending in mind, the steps to reach that end frequently changed on me. The vision shifted. Not much, but there was still a shift, and I need to go back and edit if only just to unify the story's themes. I'll get into this in a later post, though.

For now, I'm going back to the beginning: Part One of Kairos. I've spent the longest time away from it, so I think it's fitting to start there, but I'm not sure if I will always edit in chronological order, so to speak.

"Ch-chronological -- get it?" I can hear Isaac Thrush say. "It's ... it's like a time pun, because ... it's a time travel story..."

Back in the box, Thrush.

Anyway, onto what I actually promised I'd talk about in this post.

Your Story's Big Concept

As a forewarning, I tend to work in the speculative fiction side of things. Fantasy, science fiction -- basically anything that probably couldn't really happen, that's where my mind is at. I'm not sure if my thoughts can really be applied to the more grounded genres like pure romance, historical fiction, teen fiction, or the like. Those aren't really in my wheelhouse.

So, back in March 2017, I had three different projects I was working on. One was a New Adult contemporary fantasy. The second was a middle grade project inspired by the Studio Ghibli films me and my best friend grew up with. The third was Kairos. I had chapters written for all three. Why did I decide to share Kairos first?

Because it has a big concept.

The thing about Kairos is that it's a concept that's immediately understood. You can sum up the book in just four words: Time traveling dating service. For anybody that's read the book, you know it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's the concept that gets people through the door. I don't have to pull out a chart or write an essay to show you why the book might be fun to read. You get it. It sells itself.

Harry Potter works the same way: "Western myth about witchcraft is actually real."

You'll notice that both of these concepts don't mention the characters in any way, which probably seems counterintuitive. I mean, everybody read Harry Potter because of Rowling's unforgettable characters. (I am still salty about Dumbledore, by the way. Taken before his time.)

That's because I don't think readers initially invest in a story because of the characters. Think about it: On the first word of the first page, why should the reader care about a character already? They haven't done anything of merit yet. Sometimes, it can take pages to show an audience why they should care about a character.

For example, I don't think anybody picked up Harry Potter because they wanted to read about a poor orphan boy. It was read because the dust jacket promised this fully-realized world of whimsical magic that was distinct and colorful and rooted in just enough reality that we thought it could be real. We wanted it to be real.

(Yeah, I'm a pretty big Harry Potter fan. 'Puff pride. Why do you ask? :D)

Now, this is not to say that more complicated ideas can't or won't work. But if you can't pare down your idea into something that's less than six words, I think you're going to have to make readers pick up your book for some other reason. Honestly, I think that's why you see so many on-the-nose titles on Wattpad:

I'm Pregnant with The Millionaire Bad Boy's Baby.

The Kinky Rock Star

My Secret Marriage to the Prince

Things like that. They're full of buzzwords that certain Wattpad audiences are looking for. There's some readers who just cannot get enough millionaires, or bad boys, or bad boy millionaires. Others want stories about fame and rock stars. And other readers just want to be a pretty pretty princess for a while. To-the-point titles are like huge neon signs for these audiences. For people who read extensively on a very narrow subject (i.e. they only want to read about millionaire bad boys), this is what gets them to read that first page. And right now, that's all we're aiming for: To get people to read that first page.

So, back to brainstorming concepts. The best ideas are always deceptively simple. A really easy method of concept creation is taking one well-known story and putting it in a completely different genre. For example:

Alien is a slasher movie (a well-known horror staple) set in space (a typical sci-fi setting, making it a different genre).

Harry Potter is a boarding school novel (an almost extinct genre before Rowling brought it back) but with magic (making it a fantasy).

This is a process very similar to the one I used to come up with Kairos. Kairos's concept combines two things that I'm interested in -- history and interpersonal relationships.

Think about the media you enjoy. What was it that made you check it out? What was it that made you keep coming back? Whatever it was, could you take it and move it into a different setting? Or a different genre entirely?

Nothing New Under the Sun

At this point, don't be too terribly concerned with originality. So many writers get hung up on trying to come up with something wholly original. Spoiler alert: It's impossible. We live in a media-saturated world, with new franchises coming out every day, and the internet ensures that stories that would've faded to obscurity 20 or 30 years ago are staying in the public's consciousness. Your story is going to be like someone else's. No matter how original, somebody somewhere is going to be reminded of something else they've seen, and they're probably going to tell you about it. Why? I'm not entirely sure. It's a thing readers do, so just get used to it.

Instead, fully commit to being unoriginal: Steal your big concept from somewhere else.

Whoa, okay, put down the pitchforks. I'm not actually advocating stealing someone else's story. That's bad juju. Let me explain by example.

You want to write a magical boarding school book like Harry Potter? Okay. What can you do to make it slightly different? Is it an all-girls boarding school? Maybe it's not a boarding school at all, but a college. So it's an all-girls college for witchcraft and sorcery. Why no guys? Maybe men don't possess the gift of magic in this world.

That's an extremely lame example (it sounds like an anime, to be honest), but I hope you get the idea. With enough time and thought and changes, this highly derivative idea could become something you'd never recognize as coming from Harry Potter. After all, how many bestsellers in recent years started as fanfiction with the names changed?

Concepts Take Time

The final ingredient in brainstorming a concept is time. As someone who has a lot of ideas and can get really excited over a new story, let me advise you to sit on an idea for a while before you start writing anything out. At least a week. Maybe two. Heck, a whole month isn't a terrible idea.

During that time, think of it often. Research related things. See if there's similar works out there, and read or watch them. Share the idea with your friends -- but like, brutally honest friends, not the kind of friends who tell you what you want to hear because they love you and don't want to hurt your feelings. I'm talking about calling up your glorious bitch friends. Keep the glorious bitch friends on tap during this process.

Anyway, the point of this exercise is to see if your feelings on this concept change over time. I cannot tell you how many times I've gotten 5k-6k words into a new story and then realize it isn't nearly as interesting as I thought it was, that there's an inherent problem with the concept, I wanted to chuck it into the sun, or that there was an existing title too eerily similar to the idea.

I know that last point contradicts with my earlier message of "don't worry about originality," but sometimes, big coincidences happen. Seriously. When I was in sixth grade, I was 10k words into a story that was extremely similar to Artemis Fowl. Super-intelligent teenaged thief enters the world of myth and magic, along with a butler sidekick, on a quest to earn her fame and fortune. The beats of the story were incredibly similar. If I had taken more than six seconds before deciding I was going to write the thing, I might've found Artemis Fowl first and been able to make changes to make my story different. But I didn't, so I wasted two months and 10k words.

(It was probably for the best, though. Sixth grade me was rolling hard into her anime phase then, and uh ... You could feel it in the story. A lot. Like an embarrassing amount. It was bad.)

Writers already waste a shit ton of time on things. We spend hours agonizing over words, plot beats, characters... If you can save two months of work by sitting on an idea for one, I think that's a pretty good exchange.

So, that's it for my thoughts on creating your story's concept. Do you have your own process? Is it different? Do you think I'm talking out of my ass? :D? Feel free to strike up a conversation. Leave a comment. In the next update, we're going to move onto Characters. It's a subject near and dear to my heart, and I've got a lot to say about it.