Concept (Why are you Writing this?)
I have a friend who tried her hand at writing a story. She was inspired by all the writing my sister and I had been doing and telling her about that she wanted to make her own. We read her character bios and chapters to give her advice. At one point we were talking and she was asking me all sorts of questions about what I thought her story needed or should have. I asked her a simple question: Why are you writing it? She said, I don’t know.
Whether you are a writer or not your reason for writing a story is everything. If you can’t tell someone why this story has to be told and what it means to you then take a step back and dig a little deeper to the heart of things. Your Concept for a story is the Why. Stan Lee’s X-Men was meant to showcase racism and bias through the lens of people born with strange abilities. Naturally, no one is born with an X gene that makes you shoot lasers from your eyes, but the characters mirrored the kind of extreme prejudice people faced for being different in the real world. In the comics, Magneto was a Jewish boy who escaped from a German death camp in 1944. The event real, the character fictional. In the real world African Americans were being beaten and discriminated against. People would run screaming from the X-Men just because they were mutants. They were not seen as human and therefore had to be contained or killed. The first issue came out in 1963, in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. Charles Xavier and Magneto have often been compared to Martin Luther King and Malcom X.
Not every story has the same why. Batman is about Justice, which he takes the form of as the Dark Knight. Superman is about someone with the powers of a god yet makes himself of servant of the people. Lord of The Rings is about sin and mankind’s struggle to destroy it. The weakest one of them all has to throw the ring into the fires of Mordor or the battle for Middle-Earth on the ground floor means nothing.
Take your story apart (dissect it mercilessly) to find your concept. If you’re not sure, here are a few questions to ask yourself about your idea:
· Why am I writing this?
-Is it simply for fun and entertainment?
-Do I have a message I’m trying to get across (racism, sexism, suffering, love, family, sacrifice)?
· What am I trying to say with this?
-If its falls into one of the aforementioned categories, what am I saying about them? What am I saying about love? What am I saying about sexism?
· What does it mean to me? (Every story doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone that it means to you, but it is vital that YOU know what you were going for when you took pen to paper. Some people still miss the Concept entirely of films and books. The author is dead, but there should be evidence to support what the author was trying to say.)
If you’re still having trouble finding your concept, talk to a friend. Tell them what your story is about and maybe they will be able to give you an idea on what seems to be at the heart of everything. If I were to hear just the plot of Lady and The Tramp, I would be able to tell it’s a love story of two people from different worlds and they are going to conflict eventually. Your Concept is as easy as that—What are you trying to say.
-Hannah
