Want to know how a story idea starts?

For me, ideas for the Seven Coins series have emerged over the past three years. In that time, I’ve tweaked and morphed the global story maybe a dozen times. I like things to interconnect and overlap, so mapping out ideas and their connections is important.

Last night, I pulled back and thought again about the series as a whole. Since I’ve already written a first draft of Silke’s Story and I’m 140K words into The Seven Coins, I didn’t include details of those in the grid. But you can see the first two books in the series taking shape. In many ways, the first three books come out of backstory that emerged in my mind to explain how we got to where we are in The Seven Coins.

In reality, adding each book will change the others some. That reality leaves me wondering how authors like Brandon Sanderson release a book before they write subsequent parts of a series. Except that Brandon has said before that he outlines a lot. Maybe that’s what I should do–produce detailed outlines on the first two stories and then toggle back to The Seven Coins.

This part of the journey is very challenging to me. I’ve already invested about 1/2 million words into two books (200K retained at this point). I’m sure I’ll be well over a million by the time I’m done with these four. Maybe 1.5 million.