In his book How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, Orson Scott Card admits:
Good stories don’t come from trying to write a story the moment I think of the first idea. [A]ll the stories I was still proud of six months after writing them have come from ideas that ripened for many months—usually years—between the time I first thought of them and the time they were ready to put into a story.
The 8 Pitfalls of Unripe Stories
Like ripening fruit, stories require the slow nourishment of sunlight and warm imaginative soil to grow into rosy, juicy maturity. Otherwise, they risk suffering the blight of the following pitfalls:
1. Meandering plot.
2. One-dimensional characters.
3. Shallow themes.
4. Underdeveloped/nonexistent subplots.
5. Weak Climax.
Writing up sparkly new ideas is like falling in love at first sight and getting married the next day. You might live happily ever after. But chances are good that, after a little more time has passed, you’ll realize you really don’t know this story so well at all. In fact, at times, it will feel like a total stranger, and you’ll begin wondering what in tarnation you’ve gotten yourself into.
It takes time and breathing space to figure out which ideas are worth committing to for the long haul.
I’ve fallen in love at first sight with many ideas that eventually proved they didn’t have the depth or staying power to support a long-term relationship.
Stories aren’t the only victims when you pull them off the vine before they’ve ripened. You suffer as well by:
1. Losing passion for a story
2. Realizing you’ve wasted our time
3. Developing the bad habit of skipping from one new idea to the next without ever finishing a draft
Figuring Out How Best to Ripen Your Stories
For me, putting a story on paper too soon—even in the roughest of outlines—risks ruining the heady organic ebb and flow of my imagination.
I prefer to leave my ideas in the greenhouse of my subconscious, pulling them out and pruning them from time to time, until I feel they’re ready. Margaret Atwood once said:
You may be wrong about being ready, but you’re rarely wrong about being not ready.
However, if this feels all wrong to you on a gut level, don’t be afraid of acknowledging that your initial ramblings on paper may indeed constitute a ripening period of your own.
Orson Scott Card again:
For some writers, one of the best ways to help an idea ripen is to try writing a draft of it, seeing what comes up when you actually try to make it into a story. As long as you recognize that the draft you write immediately after thinking of the idea will almost certainly have to be thrown away and rewritten from the beginning, you’ll be fine.
Either way, don’t be in a hurry to write down that brand new idea. Let it ripen into the full, mature flavor you’ll be able to reap a year or so into the growing season.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! Which ripening method do you prefer? Do you let your stories ripen in your subconscious? Or do you need to work them out on paper? Tell me in the comments!
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