Don't Let the Big Idea Get in the Way

A person stares at a big rock of an idea blocking their way

Last year I was (am and will be for next year at least) working on a book with the aid of a Creative Australia grant. The idea was a big one, that I have been thinking about for a long while, in fact I have had an opening scene for that book for well over a decade, but finally I thought I was ready to write the book, to hit the ground running. But the book swamped me, the idea overwhelmed me, and I spent the first few months thrashing around, trying to live up to the concept of the book, its themes and so on.

It wasn’t until I stepped back and returned to first principles that the book started to take shape, rather than a nervous thrashing around. I’d forgotten that a book starts with the little things for me. An image, a movement, a conversation (a wild smile and a match lit in a vampire’s crypt; a dead girl coming down an escalator; hands and faces flowering from the earth and grabbing a child’s feet and begging for help; a city surrounded by roiling darkness) and I build from there.

I can’t write from top down; I need to write from bottom up. I need to know my characters, their peculiarities, and then the story shapes that I tend to, will make something of them. But at the start of 2024 I forgot this. Instead of just sitting down and writing, I spent an awful lot of time panicking and worrying how I was ever going to live up to the amount of money Creative Australia had given me (even factoring the large proportion of tax I had to pay back).

Panic as a creative impulse is never a great thing. Drafting with anything deeper than story, movement, character (and the story and the character are in constant feedback) in mind. Drafting with expectations, and the worry that you won’t meet the expectations of others (whatever they actually are) is not a good thing.

Maybe for some people the whole canvas is there, and they have the big picture. But I’m the match in the dark sort of writer, working away until the big flash of lightning reveals all (though it’s only a flash, and I might have missed a whole section in all that clarity).

Ideas, big ideas, are great. Ambition is great (and I want this to be the best book I have written, my crazy, lumpy, messy Brisbane book about creating things, children, stories, and truth and untruth), but focussing on the little and moving out, working to finish the tale rather than stew in fear that it’s never going to be that big thing is the only way I get things done.

Writing is epic, but it starts small. It always starts small. Like the universe, like a child. It starts with the almost not there a particle galumphing out of some quantum space, or two gametes that connect and grow and grow, and you never know what you have until you finish it.

I held a finished book of mine for the first time a couple of days ago.  A deeply collaborative project that I am very proud to have been a part of. A dream that became a conversation, that became a failure, that became another book that started not with a big picture, but a few words, some characters, and a lot of sitting down and writing. And now I have a comic in my hands something I’ve wanted to do since I could read.

Anyway, I guess I’m saying let the story become the idea. Let the inclination grow into that grand thing. Nothing’s grand at the beginning. Get the big idea out of the way and write, otherwise you’re never going to finish anything (at least that goes for me). You can’t take risks; you can’t leap the crevasse of doubt if all you focus on is the fall.

Trust yourself, that small thing that the ideas get to type, do the work, finish it, and see what happens. You might discover the big idea was not an impassable rock on the road of the story, but it was there all along, holding your hand.