by James Scott Bell

Last week we talked about creativity, and getting ideas through the “What if?” game. I’ve always subscribed to the notion that the best way to get a great idea is to come up with lots of ideas, and then toss out the weak ones. That leaves me with several good ideas to choose from. Now the question is which one should I choose to spend the next four or five months writing? (Your mileage may vary.)

When I first got going in this game, I determined to be like a movie studio. I’d have one project that was given the “green light.” That was my work-in-progress. But I would also have a few ideas “in development.” The question then became, which one should get the green light next?

I came up with a three-part test.

Passion

The first, and most important test, is passion. If I don’t feel emotionally connected to an idea or concept, I don’t want to pursue it. Because it is passion and heart that separates our work, not only from other writers, but also the scourge of AI-slop.

I have a list of questions and assign a score, from 1-10, for each.

1. How excited are you about the concept as it stands now?
2. How invested are you in the main character?
3. Is there a meaning involved, something worth saying?
4. As a prediction, how excited do you think you’ll be about the book two months from now?

Potential

Since I write to put bread on the table, I want to consider the potential for my project in the marketplace. My questions:

1. Does my plot have high enough “death stakes” (physical, professional, or psychological)?
2. Is there a fresh setting, or a twist on a familiar one?
3. Can I envision a knockout ending?
4. Does my cast of characters turn me on? [Note: Once you start writing the book, there will be moments when the writing bogs down, when you’ll start to question your passion for the project. The fastest way to overcome this is to spend time deepening your characters, via backstory or voice journal. You’ll get excited again, and quickly, too.]

Again, score 1-10 for each.

Precision

Now, I write a logline for each project. A logline is Hollywood-speak for a sentence that captures both the essence and market potential of a project. For example:

A great white shark hunts for food in the waters of a New England town at the height of tourist season.

A teenager takes a time-traveling DeLorean into the past, where his young mother gets the hots for him, and where he must get his father to win her again or he’ll cease to exist.

Detective partners who dislike each other must bond in order to stop a serial killer who chooses victims based on the Seven Deadly Sins.

Score 1-10 for each logline on how well it captures market potential.

I add up the scores for each project, and the “winner” gets the green light.

This method gives me some objectivity, because it’s easy to just grab the next bright idea and start running with it. Again, I’m going to spend months with the project. I owe it to myself to think a little on it before I take the plunge.

One last note on the problem of AI-slop. When it comes to the writing itself, we all know it can be “handed off” to a bot. What that produces, at least as I see it, is heartless, soulless competence. It certainly does not produce the kind of writing that makes readers yearn for more books with your name on them.

Will a bot ever produce writing that does? Perhaps not! One writer puts it this way:

LLM-generated prose is, by virtue of the process that creates it, frozen verbal leftovers. An LLM is perfectly capable of imitating … compound sentences, especially the most basic, unsurprising constructions (“This is not that; it’s actually this.”). And because the vast majority of humans have no desire for anything better, LLMs appear to be good writers. But they’re not….The machines we’ve created can do only the bare minimum passably well because the same is true of us.

I choose to believe that the human element—honed by hard work, experience, honesty, and heart—will always produce a better book than a machine. [Note: Em dashes are mine!]

Now over to you. How do you choose which book to write next? If it’s the next in a series, how do you decide on plot and setting and new characters?