For those who don’t follow me on Instagram, I started a series a couple of weeks ago mapping my writing process. For the second step in ‘Writing a Book’, I took a prompt to show how a book plot can be build upon an idea. The prompt was Pillars of Creation (PoC, henceforth). It’s an iconic Hubble Telescope image of elephant trunks, a small feature within the Eagle Nebula. I have never written a story based solely on one term or picture, and the process doesn’t always go in this direction, but it was an excellent exercise to see where a small “seed” can take you. My genre is science fiction, so that’s what I’ll use here, but this has a good potential for historical fiction too. I started with-
1. Mind Mapping
One of the methodologies I LOVE for brainstorming ideas is Mind Mapping, for which I either use a notebook, a whiteboard, or this app (miMind). I roughly jotted all the ideas and thoughts that branched from the main prompt.
2. Figuring out the sub-genre
Labeling books with sub-genres is not important at all, but I still do it because it helps me in figuring out the structure and other elements of the story. Sometimes, an idea itself will demand a certain sub-genre. With this one, because it was a prompt given by someone else, I went with the perspective of human exploration to make it more relatable, instead of using aliens or AI or other sci-fi entities. Now, I could use the PoC two ways—use it literally, which would demand space-travel, or use it symbolically, where a character discovers, say, a painting of the PoC, and it becomes a driving force for something. I got enticed by both ideas. I liked the visual of someone way, way into the future, traveling towards the nebula, while also metaphorically using the PoC as some sort of driving force.
To make space-travel possible to a nebula that’s thousands of light-years away, I’d have to create a world with futuristic space-traveling technology. I am not a big fan of faster-than-light (FTL) travel, so I’ll use or make-up other transportation system, like wormholes or Hypervelocity Stars. This, along with the tone that writing a metaphorical journey will demand, made me conclude that it’s going to be a space-opera-ish story with literary elements.
3. Research
The only thing I knew about the PoC is that it was a picture taken of a part of the Eagle Nebula. Since the nebula is a real interstellar medium, I wanted to know more about it before going further. In fact, I was sure that’s where I’ll find the hook for this story. I started reading about both the PoC and the Eagle Nebula, and the few things that grabbed my attention were this:
- The PoC was surrounded by some 8100 stars
- The leftmost pillar is about four light-years in length and the small tentacles protruding at the top of the clouds are larger than our Solar System (wtaf!!).
- To understand this last point, you should know that the Eagle Nebula is 7000 light-years away. Meaning, it takes the light from the nebula 7000 years to reach us. Sunlight takes 8 minutes to reach us, so you can imagine the distance. This also means, we are seeing the pillars as they were 7000 years ago. Now, a lot of astronomers believe that the pillars were swept away 6000 years ago by a previously unseen supernova blast that happened nearby, and we will see its obliteration from Earth in 1000 years. Some astronomers disagree, and there is actually a team that searching through historical records to see if ancient astronomers spotted the supernova responsible for the pillars’ destruction 1000-2000 years ago!
Hold that thought.
4. Figuring out the theme
I cannot help but think of ‘curiosity’ and ‘hope’ after reading the last part of that research. It also looks like a meaningful connection between the past and the future. But how can someone easily travel to the stars a gazillion miles away even in the future? Maybe the protagonist is a space captain? Maybe they live in a utopic world where space travel is affordable to all? Or maybe it’s a common thing in that century. Or they win a holiday trip in the lottery! For now, I went with the utopic setting, since it’s rare. Plus, a quest for ‘hope’ in a world that’s already pretty hopeful seems scrumptious.
5. Making of the protagonist
I can enjoy a bad plot with interesting characters, but not vice versa. It’s why my main focus is always on my characters, especially the protagonist/s. If the image and the research details give a theme of ‘hope’, who else can be the perfect hero to such a story than someone with no hope at all?
Since the gender of the protagonist is not relevant to the story, I could use any, but because I am always gravitated towards writing women protagonists, I will do that here too. A woman with no hope in life, traveling through space towards the Pillars of Creation. Now why would she do that? What would drive her to travel intergalactically when she doesn’t even know if the next day itself will have anything better to hold? To find answers? To find the truth? To test life? To meet someone? To find a purpose? I found those answers in my Research and Theme. I was listening to an Arabic song, so on a whim, I named the protagonist Eanid, which Google says is the Arabic word for ‘tenacious’, because one might be stubborn and headstrong, if they are willing to cross galaxies to find answers even when they have nothing to look forward to in life.
6. Building the plot line
I collected everything I had discovered and created so far, the research, the world, the form of travel, the protagonist, and drafted a small plot summary. Without even trying much, the story was building its three acts on its own.
- The Hero leaves the Ordinary World: Having lost her partner, child, job, and home, a drunk and grief-stricken professor, Eanid, breaks into the ancient library of her university to spend the night. She stumbles upon an old research paper that argues against the existence of the Pillars of Creation (I also liked the idea of Eanid reading research work of her ancestor who was on the team that searched for historical records of ancient astronomers)
- The Hero ventures into unknown territory: After looking at the still-intact Eagle Nebula through the telescope and wondering about its fate, Eanid decides to blow her Social Security benefits and head towards the Eagle Nebula to quench her rapidly extinguishing curiosity.
- The Hero returns in triumph/or not: I usually need to know how the story ends before I start the first draft. This particular story can end in many ways – She finds the PoC and the hope to live. She finds the PoC but not the hope to live. She does not find the PoC but has found a purpose. Or she finds neither the PoC nor the will to live and gives up (wouldn’t make a good story though).
Whatever the ending, it is established from the theme and summary that it is the journey where all the meat of the book will lie. It’s a pretty common premise—a person struck with loss goes on an introspective journey to find a new purpose—but the world, the character, and the journey is where the story will bring something unique to the table. What will Eanid do on this intergalactic travel? Whom will she meet? What will she learn? What will she unlearn? Which galaxies and obstacles will she cross? How will she overcome her grief? Is someone else heading there as well? It’s all there, in the journey.
And there we have it. A rough big picture plot. A theme. A setting. A protagonist, and their conflict all based on a small seed of idea. With this information in mind, I would start outlining the book, building the character and the world, or start writing the first draft. I will most likely change a lot of it as I go further into the writing process, but this is not a bad place to start.