Brainstorming...With NO Idea of Plot But Maybe a Character

Today's Earworm: "Sur ma route" by Black M
Today's Date: September 12, 2016

Oh no! The horror! The Terror!

You need a story for an anthology submission, or a new book! Or you want to just write...

But you don't have any kind plots in the back burner. What do you do?

Well, you brainstorm. Okay, hold up, hear me out before you freak out about that suggestion.

This is how a plot comes to be. You brainstorm. You think about what you want to do and create a basic plotline and some characters. From there, you think of how things get from point A to point B in your story.

That's brainstorming.

But what if you don't have a plot point or anything but a character?

Well, that's where brainstorming comes from. Just randomly sitting down and typing a word. Any word and then building it up from there. Most times the character is going to give you jack all that can be used for a story, but you can still find a plot for them from there.

Let's see.

I can take a character and write out something for that character and turn it into a future plot. That's what I'm doing with my drabble series.

Yes, I'm working on them. I've just been scary busy lately so sorry you guys.

Anyways, you take a character.

Do you have an idea of them in some way? Looks? Personality? A line that they say? Their jobs or careers? Something?

Well, there's a good start. You have a character and something about them.

Let me give you an example. For Black Veiled Saviour, my murder-mystery, I didn't have a plot.

I had a character named Alexx, another character named Bo, and a pretty not quite pastel goth named Lollipop in my head. Her name has been since changed to something else mind you.

That's all I had.

So I sat there and went, "What does Alexx do? What does Bo do? And how does Lollipop bring these two boys together?"

Well, Alexx was easy. He was and always has been a bartender in my head. So I went "Alright, what is Bo?" Well, I didn't know so I started to read one of my many crime mysteries and one of them had a private investigator.

It clicked. That's what Bo was! He was a private investigator and poor Lollipop was a dead girl who the cops had no urge to discover why she had been killed.

So how to make them meet then?

Well, Lollipop was like any gothy girl who was of legal age. She went to a club. And since Alexx is a bartender, why not have him working at one of her favorite clubs? And Bo goes there on a lead and bam! We have our two main characters meet.

Now...don't think that this took me less then a few hours to come up with.

No. Oh no no no. It took me nearly two weeks of messing with this one idea  while working on things that I actually had a plan for.

And then writing that first chapter took me four days to write because I kept stopping to make notes about what was going on. I actually ended up scrapping that first chapter after writing it because it didn't read right but I kept some parts of it for chapters 2 and 3.

See what I did though? I had characters so I built from there.

Sometimes you don't have characters either. Don't worry. If anything, find a random prompt generator and write drabbles, flash stories, or short pieces around that prompt.

That's actually how a few of my older stories came to be.

Or go on Twitter and ask for prompts. See what strikes and what duds on you.

Brainstorming is all about finding that spark that you can build into a roaring plot. Remember, fires aren't just magically created. You have to build with bits of this and that before you can get a proper fire going.

Writing is just the same as that.