I write them. Kidding, not kidding.

One of the blessings of being a prolific writer is that my idea list and my book production find a happy equilibrium somewhere in the range of 3-7 books per year. If that sounds like a shit ton of books to you, you're not wrong. If that sounds like a suspiciously small number of shiny new ideas, you're also not wrong.

Therein lies the balance.

I see new book ideas everywhere. This could become a real problem, so the flipside of it is a long-standing habit of weeding out the ones I'm not 100% invested in. Also the ones that can support a whole story, plus what length of story that's likely to be.

The story-length question is a particularly important one for me. I have a hypothesis about idea size vs. book length that I've toyed with for some time, and it runs something like this: a novella centers on one character's problem, or two characters if you're pushing it. A novel can broaden the view, looking at a character's problem in the context of a societal problem. You start to see the broader world and how it interplays with the individual, but you can't expect to fix that societal problem in the span of the book. That's the work of a series, which can tackle a societal-scale problem through the lens of the MC (and MC's problems) embedded in it.

Many ideas can be expanded or contracted to a certain degree, but that requires adding more layers (to expand) or focusing in on a smaller story within a bigger concept (to contract). For example, a heist to steal a magical item might be a novella. A dual-POV Fantasy-Romance whose heist is a ploy to foil a wizard trying to burn down a village is a novel. If your MCs then discover the wizard is just a front for some shadowy government organization gathering power behind the guise of smaller villains, you've got a series on your hands.

On the other end of the spectrum, some ideas might not even support a novella without padding, either. These can be turned into novelettes, short stories, or even flash fiction. If the whole point of an idea is to capture a certain scene, character exchange, or punchline, you probably have a smaller piece of fiction.

Examples? 

1. At least a chonky novel. More likely a series!

2. A very nice-sized Fantasy-Romance novel, provided your protagonist does not march off to war against the humans, or attempt change perceptions of beauty among those who shunned them. That's a series. 

3. As this one stands, novella! Add a few more layers to make a novel.

4. Not even a novella without padding. Would make a cute short story.

Why is this important for weeding out ideas? Well, let's say I find a writing prompt that I think is kind of cool. Not grab-me-by-the-collar-must-write-this cool, but cool enough to do something with. If I look at that prompt and realize it's novella-sized, neat! I'll throw it on my novella-ideas pile for next ONC, Halloween, etc. But if I look at that idea and realize it would probably take a trilogy to execute it at peak coolness, I'm no longer invested enough to spend that kind of time. The idea gets discarded, or dissected into component parts and used as scrap for other books. Or turned into flash fiction. Flash fiction is a great way to burn off kind-of-cool but also super tiny ideas that would otherwise clutter up my idea pile and make it seem bigger than it actually is. I use that tactic a lot.

All this means I might scroll through a hundred writing prompts on Pinterest and find a) a half-dozen new flash-fiction ideas OR fragments that will need to combine with other things to make a book idea, b) a cool series concept that I'm not invested enough to write, and/or c) one prompt that inspires one scene in a pre-existing WIP, none of which qualify as shiny new ideas. The real shinies that support a whole story I actually want to write are so few and far between, I might only stumble across half a dozen in an average year. Aka my book count for a year.

Now, that all makes it sounds like I write them immediately, which (usually) isn't the case. The main place such a thing happens is the ONC, and even then, chances are I'll have most of my novella ideas months or even years in advance. I just find prompts that fit them come February 1st, and off I go.

All other ideas go into my book queue.

My book queue is kind of like a waiting chamber. Also kind of like a ladder, from my idea slush-pile on the floor up to my actual writing desk. Most of what's in that slush pile is fragments: pieces of books (settings, characters, concepts, even scenes) that have the spark I look for, but don't stand on their own yet. Everything in the pile is waiting for another fragment or three to glue itself together with to form a whole book concept, and the moment that happens, the new book moves into the queue.

I work through my queue in a pattern that used to be more organized than it is now, but there's still at least a bit of logic to it. Besides the book commitment levels I mentioned in Q2 of this Q&A, I also subdivide my WIPs by length of project, with "slots" for different lengths. It looks something like this:

The first three rows proceed in an orderly fashion. Whenever my epic-series, smaller-series, or standalone-novel slot empties out, my next project of that length steps up from my queue to fill it. What's worth noting, though, is that those "standalone novels" only cover the higher-commitment works in my queue. I only take on one of those at a time, but as anyone who reads my monthly roundups is aware, I have far more WIPs than that.

Enter sprintable novels! These are standalone projects usually between 50k and 100k words (so, small- to medium-novel length) that don't take as much intense research or rigorous planning as their higher-commitment counterparts. I can finish one of these fairly quickly—As the Crow Falls, for example, was written in just six weeks, though a few months is a more reasonable estimate for most. Because of this writing ease, these books are good at giving me a breather while slogging through longer and/or tougher projects that take much more time. Plus I get a new novel to post much sooner than I would otherwise. Win-win-win.

Novellas fulfill a similar role. While the Open Novella Contest is a yearly commitment for me, I also like sprinting and speed-posting a Horror novella for Halloween, and might start any other short project anytime I get bored or have a short idea that won't leave me alone. These little suckers can be done in a matter of weeks (hypothetically days, but I've yet to accomplish that) and I also get another new book out of them, so they're great fun.

Novellas and sprintable novels behave differently in my queue. They still get added to it, and like their more orderly counterparts, they may still stay in it for months to years, migrating up through the line, gathering detail, characters, and other units of development along the way. Like all queue ideas, they might have full plots by the time they reach my desk. The difference is that sprintable books are allowed to "jump the queue" so long as they don't hijack my existing works-in-progress... which they still do anyway sometimes, but it's for the greater good, right?

Do my more orderly queue books tempt me before it's their turn? Surprisingly, no. They're happy enough knowing they'll be written eventually, because that's a guarantee from the moment they get in line. I also still worldbuild or plot them when ideas arise—it's only the writing itself I hold off on. When I work on 3-5 books at a time already, I need some kind of control! 😆

If you're a writer, how do you decide what book to write next?

Do you keep some kind of idea repository or writing queue? If so, how does it work?

If you're a reader (or writer!), what kinds of chaotic things have you seen authors do when writing or posting new books?