As I am writing this, I’m getting close to a hand-off point, when I’ll have just wrapped up one of my latest SSCS’s (the Serial Stream-of-Consciousness Stories that I work on periodically as a break from my more directed writing) and will then be needing to add a new SSCS onto my docket (I usually have three running at any given time).  That begs the question: What should I use as my seed for the next one?

The story ideas I use for my SSCS’s are a little bit different than what I use for the rest of my fiction.  They’re more atmospheric and less focused – much less goal oriented.  The primary idea is to pick something that I can play with.  I can’t say these stories are 100% pantsed (what writers often call writing without a plan, as in ‘flying by the seat of your pants’) because I always get to a point where I need to start organizing something about the story or I won’t actually be having any fun.  But it has to be something that leaves itself open to taking unexpected turns just because I feel like it.

I’m never good at knowing the end of a story before I start writing, but with my SSCS’s I usually start with even less than that, barely evening knowing the beginning, with just an image or a quirky idea that I can hold in mind just long enough for some words to start flowing.  A seed.

My favorite one so far (you’ll get to see it next year! starting in January 2025), both for the seed itself and because I’m pretty pleased with how the final story turned out, actually used some images from a dream as the seed.  But this was very unusual for me.  Normally my dreams are not interesting enough, at least not in a way my waking mind finds compelling, for me to want to pursue any of those images or ideas further.  This one, though, had something that I find is often useful for me creatively: It mashed together several very specific elements that normally I wouldn’t think to put together.  Still, this is the only time I have gotten a story idea from a dream.  So…that’s definitely not a reliable method for picking the next one.

I do have a rather large horde of story ideas.  Story ideas are shiny, and I like to take them out and look through them from time-to-time.  But most of those story ideas have goals attached to them, or are just really darned big, so they’re not well suited to an SSCS.  However, at this point I have finished three SSCS’s, and have three more in progress (one of them soon to be finished), so I am starting to get an idea of the sorts of things that could make for a good seed.  I have learned:

1) That it’s useful and nice to pick a seed that’s got a pretty different tone from the other SSCS’s currently in progress.  For my first SSCS, I just wanted to play with lots of flowery words and imagery, to let my prose be as purple as I wanted.  Right now, one of my in-progress SSCS’s is using a similar approach, though, so…I should probably pick something different (not flowery-prose-oriented) for this next one.  For my second SSCS, I wanted to try to practice writing humor.  I still need lots of practice with that…but that means one of my other currently-in-progress SSCS’s is focused around humor.  So, that’s not really open right now either.  Looking at elements other than the style of prose, I realized recently that large bodies of water play a significant role in four of my six finished or in-progress SSCS’s (and apparently krakens and/or bioluminescence really like to show up as well?).  So, tone-wise, the main thing I’ve got right now is that I might want to freaking give water a rest.  …Any ideas?  There hasn’t been a lot of vegetation in any of the SSCS’s I’ve done so far.  Can I work in a seed with a setting that’s nice and green?

2) But, I’ve got to be careful.  I’ve also learned that with an SSCS-style story, a seed that requires too much world-building might be a non-starter (I had one seed I tried to use for an SSCS that kind of just flopped on its face and did not get up).  Even if it’s not a non-starter, it might end up being a really heavy lift that can take some of the ‘I’m-just-doodling-with-words’ fun out of working on these things.  Actually, that goes for characters, too (too many, that is).  Actually, it’s a balancing act – there is a sweet spot, somewhere.  I have one SSCS (the one that’s almost done) that started with too many main characters and also managed to acquire too many villains?  I still have high hopes for it, but, oof.  On the other hand, I’ve got another one in progress with only one main character and really nebulous boundaries on the world-building, and right now that story is really suffering from ‘too-random-and-no-stakes’.  So, got to pick a seed with just the right amount of seed-ish-ness.  Right?  Right.

3) Other lessons so far?  Perhaps that these stories tend to skew kind of dark if I don’t build some darkness in from the beginning (if that makes any sense – writers need something to care about in the story just as much as the readers, you know).  With that in mind, maybe this time around I should try to include, up front, a sense of what type of dark is going to go with this seed.  Should it be straight-up horror?  Should it try to focus on really small, personal dramas?  Should we try for something with an adventure feel that will have peril and possibly bloodshed commensurate with that?  It’s worth giving it a shot, at least.  If it works, it might help protect against the tonal whiplash that tends to result when I’ve gotten some several installments into a new SSCS, realize I’m desperate for stakes, or at the very least conflict, and therefore immediately grab for whatever is the opposite of what I’ve been doing so far.  (Remember, my first SSCS started with a description of flowers and ended with a worlds-spanning cataclysm, so…)

So, that’s:

1. Maybe pick a seed involving greenery?
2. Try to plan for using more than one character and start with some sort of specificity in the world-building, but don’t go overboard.
3. Try pairing whatever I pick with a ‘type-of-darkness’ ahead of time.

Doesn’t that list just make brand-new shiny ideas just spring to mind?  No?  So, now let’s look briefly at a couple more generic approaches for thinking about this (remember, idea-generation really is just like any other problem-solving exercise. I believe I might have talked about this before.):

A) I could try to do something like a sequel to one of my previous SSCS’s.  They all lacked greenery, but that could be fixed with a setting change of some sort, if I really wanted (oooh, something with lush grasslands…how much setting would it be not plagiarism for me to steal from Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass?).  Anyway, I actually do have ideas for something sequel-ish for three of my so-far SSCS’s, two of them actual sequels, and one that’s really just a thematic sequel.  I’m not sure it’s the right time to start on any of those just yet, but I can’t exactly pretend I don’t have any ideas that aren’t exactly suited to an SSCS-style story.

B) I could recycle one of the more orphaned ideas from my vast idea horde.  Several of them I love very much, but I am a slow writer, and I ought to be realistic that not all of my horde ideas are going to get the BIG treatment I would usually wish for them.  That’s especially true for the story ideas that haven’t really managed to accrete any real characters yet.  But, interestingly, those ones do tend to be ideas with greener settings (jungle pine-trees! no, really!).  So, maybe a good approach would be to down-scope one of the beloved-but-languishing ideas from my horde and see how that goes.

C) Or I could just try making myself a grab-bag of nifty imagery, some beautiful specificities, and funky (or even obnoxious) ideas that all seem really random together at first, poke them together and see what sticks.  They just need to rattle around against each other enough for words to want to happen.  Or maybe I should go straight for beautiful specificity and just smash it against that obnoxious list of ‘pointers’ I’ve got there up above.  That may very well make for sufficient idea conflict all on its own.

We’ll see.  I’m not to the point of needing to start a new SSCS just yet.

Happy dreaming.