Ideas often start chaotic and unmanageable. Maybe the idea is an experience you had on vacation or a memorable sentence; perhaps it’s an image or some sort of lesson you want to illustrate. It’s interesting, but it’s also far too broad to use directly. It’s a character, setting, conflict, and ending all at the same time. A story seed can condense these into one focused element and act as your launching point.
A good story seed is not a plot outline. Think of a story seed as one or two sentences about who the story is about, what the change is, and why it’s important. Instead of “I want to write a story about friendship,” try writing, “A shy kid has to decide whether to defend her friend who was wrongly accused of doing something.” This gives the draft a main character, pressure, choice, and an indication of change. It isn’t the whole story, but it does provide a direction for the first draft.
Sometimes loose ideas get too unwieldy because they are trying to say several things. A memory about moving to a new city could also be a story about family, or fear, or money, or weather, or culture, or a lost bag at the train station. Yes, but they don’t all need to. Before you start drafting, ask yourself one question: what is the major shift that I want my readers to feel? It can be about feeling braver, or admitting a mistake, or leaving a thing or situation behind, or seeing someone or something in a new way.
A good way to test your idea is to write it in three variations, each one getting more concise. Start by writing it in five sentences. Then rewrite it in two sentences. Finally, try to write it as a single sentence that keeps the character, pressure, and change. This isn’t a goal in making the story smaller. The idea is to help the writer see the main thread so the draft has one thread to hold onto. When writing later scenes or backstory or dialogue, your draft can grow organically from this point rather than being tugged in different directions.
Once you have a seed, the last step is to find the movement. Flat story seeds usually describe an experience but not an action. “A girl spends her summer at a lake” gives a setting, but there isn’t a narrative arc yet. But if you say, “a girl who fears deep water must cross a lake on a kayak to give a lost notebook back before a storm,” you now have a goal, an obstacle, a high stake, and a possible climax. The second description invites scene work, in which something goes wrong and leads to a change in the story.
Avoid the urge to turn the seed into something that sounds impressive but doesn’t actually say anything useful. You shouldn’t use a seed like “a deep look into power and redemption,” because that doesn’t help you write the story. Plain sentences are better at this stage: just name the character, the situation, and the pressure. Save style for later. A clear idea can be written using ordinary language, whereas a vague one can require lots of words before the story itself begins.
A good indicator that you have a good story seed is that you see the next scene more clearly. You see where the character is standing, what he or she wants, what stands in the way, and how the conflict might be resolved. Keep the story seed close as you write. When backstory or character description or pretty prose start trying to grab the attention in the draft, stop and reread the seed again. Ask whether this passage helps the story grow toward the seed’s idea of change, or if it’s just getting in the way.