What’s the best way to get started with a story? I suggest you consider asking the question, What if? That question—What if?—can stimulate your entire creative process. You start to think about answering that question, and it can take you in a wide range of directions that can lead to some pretty interesting story lines. After all, a book is not a short story. A novel is something that is expansive. So when you start asking “What if …,” it can lead you to think about how something would affect a particular community, or how it would affect the worldview of a person, or how would it affect characters in the story.
In my book Children of Abraham, the is, What if God decided that He was going to communicate with the earth in some way? Well, what if He was going to do that? How would He do that? Would He do it by speech? Would He do it by written word? How would He do it in such a way as to maintain some distance? How could He do it in such a way that it would be credible? So that gives rise to the idea that perhaps He would use a ticker tape display in Times Square or the ticker that shows up on the bottom of the screen on news stations.And then you have to ask the question, What about the characters? What if these messages from God were appearing? How would that affect the characters? Would they brush them off? Would they care about them? Would it cause some kind of epiphany? Would it change them? How would it affect the Middle East conflict? Who would redeem themselves, and who would not redeem themselves? Asking “What if?” gives rise to all of these questions, and answering them makes up page after page after page of writing.
Bob Martin is the author of Children of Abraham and is working on his second book for publication later this year