Tips for Sequels and Focusing Ideas

elementrolls asked you: I'm one of those people who tends to have a lot of ideas from the get go, but I have a hard time deciding what's just a fun idea (that I might explore in a sequel or another book) and what really needs to go in the story. Any tips on focusing?

One of the pseudo-problems I run into when brainstorming happens when I get a bunch of ideas and suddenly I think I have to either pick this idea or that idea, when most of the time, I can use both ideas. So if you have a lot of ideas, try to see if you can use most of them.

With that said, there is a point where you have to stop yourself or your story will get longer than Lord of the Rings, which isn't a bad thing, but most writers aren't looking to write stories that long.

There are also times when you don't want to use all of your ideas; for example, if you are writing a medieval fantasy, you might not want to throw in time-traveling aliens after you already have a quest story for the main plot. Time-traveling aliens just doesn't fit.

For sequels, a good technique is to look at how you can broaden or deepen your storyline so that the conflict goes farther or deeper than the book before.

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Expand, Deepen, Create Motion: 3 Methods that Keep Details Interesting

Over the last six months or so, I've learned a few new things about writing scenes. Today, specifically I'm going to share some techniques that can tweak your scene here and there to make it more interesting and to keep it from going stale. They are, expand, deepen, and create motion.

As some of you know, I work for David Farland, so his writing tips and lessons obviously have an impact on me, which is why I make sure to mention him right there on the right-hand column of my blog. Well, one of his writing tips led me to come up with the contents of today's post. This is just like a little hypothesis of mine that has developed over the last few months.

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