Every story begins with a spark–a concept that inspires imagination and fuels storytelling. Developing that seed concept into a story-worthy premise requires identifying the potential for conflict and emotion within your idea. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to develop the elements of your premise into a full draft and get ready to write.
Identify the inciting incident that disrupts your protagonist’s ordinary world. Explore the initial problem they’re facing, how that conflict will impact their life, and how it will progress.
Create key characters that drive your story forward. Consider their goals, motivations, and conflicts and use them to develop a clear arc for each character that will propel your story from beginning to end.
At this stage, you may also wish to define your setting. Whether you’re working in the real world or in a speculative universe, it helps to establish important facets of your world like geography, culture, and religions.
Writers work on ideas all the time. They make lists, collect scraps of dialog, and brainstorm in a variety of ways. Over time, writers learn what sorts of things trigger their brains to develop new ideas–a walk in nature, an opportune conversation, a conversation with an exec, making Pinterest boards, cleaning the house, or even going to a movie.
Some writers, called plotters, prefer to complete a lot of pre-writing before they put pen to paper. Others, known as pantsers, prefer to discover their stories as they draft. There are many different approaches to this process, and most writers fall somewhere in between these extremes. Whatever method you use, the goal is to turn your seed into a draft that can be edited into a polished narrative.