It’s in the soul of a writer to want to create something awesome. But sometimes, awesome stories just don’t come. Today, I’m going to go through some steps to follow to write a cool story, even if you have no idea what to write about.

Now, please note that these are purely suggestions. There are many ways to write a story, just as there are many ways to skin a cat. What skinning cats has to do with writing (or anything else, for that matter), I have no idea, but the principle still stands.

So without further ado, here are the first few steps on how to write a cool story. The remaining steps will be forthcoming because this thing is going to get really long really quick.

Step 1: Get a Cool Idea

Naturally, the first step to writing something cool is to have a cool idea. Now, this may initially sound like I’m asking you to just on your butt waiting for the universe to shove something into your head willy-nilly. That is not true. The process of having good ideas is actually a fairly active one, even if it starts off seeming completely passive.

It’s all about letting your mind do its own work. For some reason, we have trouble trusting our instincts, and I think this is where most instances of writer’s block occur. We worry too much about doing things “right,” and in worrying, we obstruct our subconscious mind from expressing itself.

One way to let good ideas come is by sitting and breathing. Just breathe. Relax. Focus on the inflow and outflow of air through your nostrils. Turning on music can help sometimes, but I find it’s just as often distracting as it is helpful. Find what works for you, though—the key is to relax with a blank page in front of you.

After taking a few minutes to meditate (because that’s really what this is), just start spewing stuff on the page. None of it has to make sense—you’re simply letting your mind express itself for a bit. If crap comes out, then it means you had a clog to clear out before the pure waters of inspiration could come.

Sooner or later, something interesting will come out. Build on it, but be careful not to get in your mind’s way. Just let it develop as it will. Yes, at some point you will have to take a more intentional approach to writing the story, but that time is not now. You’re still in the ideating phase, and while you may have one cool idea, there will be other cool stuff connected to it that you don’t want to miss.

For instance, if in the course of your freewriting you think of people in primitive armor riding giant battle ostriches, you may be tempted to start hammering this into shape in isolation. However, if you hijack it too soon, you may miss out on the fact that they channel magic through moonlight to stave off sleep, and that sleep invites the shadowy nightmares that are lurking just beyond the sunset. If you let your mind work for a while, those items and more will find their way into the setting.

Once you have a lovely mess of ideas, it’s time to go on to smelting it into something usable.

Step 2: Smelting

The ideas are the raw ore. Now you need to smelt them into something resembling steel. Otherwise, you just have pig iron, and that’s not going to shape up too well.

Distill from your ideas the following:

Setting

This consists of relevant places, world events, philosophies, religions, foods, etc. It is there for your story to exist, and the story will be informed by it.

Interesting People

No one really likes stories about boring people (unless they die horribly at the end). Make sure your characters are worth reading about. In the end, no real person is truly boring. Those who seem to be boring are probably just deluding themselves with overinflated notions of normalcy.

An Objective

This is what you want the characters to accomplish. Simple enough.

Another Objective

This objective stands in opposition to whatever your heroes are striving for. The more inconvenient it is for them, the better.

These are the refined materials from which you’ll build a plot. It’s important for them to be fleshed out, so it may be necessary to do some character and setting sketches. However, be careful not to get too carried away. It’s easy to get caught up in trivia that really won’t impact the story at all. At the same time, don’t be too utilitarian either. The characters, setting, and events need to help you understand the elements in your story as if they were real, even if those specific details aren’t explicitly mentioned in the final product.

Step 3: Plot, i.e. Make a Horrible Mess

Once you have your basic elements, it’s time to start plotting. A story should be more than just “A bunch of stuff happens. The end.” Plot where your characters will go, what they will do, and why. Remember, if they are genuine characters, they’ll do what they want, so you need to account for their whims and desires as you go. Fortunately, you have a great deal of control over what happens to them, so you can give them a nudge every now and then that will influence their decisions.

A caveat though: be careful not to railroad them. Give them incentives to make their own choices, but don’t constantly threaten them at gunpoint. That gets boring pretty quick. It may be there are multiple paths they can take to get to their destination. Make sure they have some reason to get there, of course, but also give them reasons to second guess it or even diverge from the path for a while. That can help them develop into what they need to be to win out at the end, so plot setbacks could be just as important as moving the plot forward.

Also, make sure you give the opposing objective fair play as well. The pursuers of the “anti-plot”—whether they be people, natural forces, the soul of magic, unicorns, or straight-up, simple fate—should be allowed to act. They will make a mess of things. Let them. It will make things far more interesting.

It can take some effort and careful planning (and re-planning) to make sure you have a plot that functions, but it will be worth it when you start drafting.

Step 4: Draft

Begin the draft. Just write it, but don’t rush it. If you do rush it, you run the risk of simply trying to get to the next plot point, and it becomes really easy to skip over the “anti-plot.” This creates a story where the heroes overcome all their obstacles with hardly any effort and everything works out perfectly all the time.

Take your time, give the characters, setting, and opposition a chance to be as real as they can be, and keep working until it’s done.

Step 5: Let it Age

The next step (and the last one I’ll cover today) is easy. Just let it sit on the shelf (or on your hard drive) for a while. This will enable you to look at it with fresh eyes when you get to Step 6. In the meantime, you can do a great number of things, including:

• Go for a walk
• Make a casserole
• Talk to friends
• Catch up on work
• Devise your next story
• Plan a heist
• Execute your plans to take over the world using only Styrofoam and several legions of ducks

The point is to give your mind a break from the story you just drafted. This is important both to preserving your own sanity as well as allowing you to have a more impartial, unclouded perspective when you finally review your first draft.

The remaining steps will be outlined in a forthcoming post, so be on the lookout for that! Thank you for reading, and we will not see you next time. Because this is a blog. Not face-to-face conversation. And there’s only one of me, so no “we” would be present to see you anyway.

What do you think of this process so far? Think it’ll work? Or do you think I’m a babbling idiot who will never amount to anything? Let me know in the comments! Also, please spread this thing around. All proceeds go toward making a horrible mess. Really.