My writing focus for February has been developing a new book concept. I’ve had an idea lurking for a long time, even tried writing it years ago but didn’t like the result, then recently came up with a new way to approach the concept that I think will work better (and be marketable), so I want to write it. And that means doing all the work to flesh out the concept so it starts looking more like a book. A concept is just a general idea — I had a vague sense of the main character and the plot and setting, but not much else.

As often happens, I felt like I had a full book ready to go until I started writing down what I know about it and realized how vague it was. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve developed the main characters and I have a lot of backstory, so I thought I was ready to work on plot, but then I realized that the world is really vague, and that will affect the plot. So now I need to figure out more about this world and society.

This kind of work is basically a cycle of fleshing out and sharpening what I have. I get a clearer character, which gives me more ideas for the plot, which gives me ideas for the world, which also affects the plot, and that then affects the characters. I guess it’s like sculpting, where you start with a block of marble roughly the size of the piece you’re making, and then you start taking off chunks until it’s sort of the right shape, and then from there you use different tools to get closer to the shape you want until you’re finally doing the fine detail and polishing it.

It’s been a few years since I last created an entirely new concept and new world, so I forgot how involved it can get, especially when the story deals with a big-picture world instead of one focused location. I tend to get impatient to start writing, but I’ve learned the hard way that the more thought I put in ahead of time, the better the book is. If the ideas are still vague when I start writing and I figure that I’ll get more specific as I go along, I seldom get specific enough and the book falls apart at the end.

I’d planned to start writing at the beginning of March to get enough of a very rough draft to see if the concept works, but I may have to delay that a bit. I have to remind myself that it’s better to get it right, and that will end up saving me time in the long run because I won’t spend months trying to figure out an ending after I’ve written the book. At the same time, this kind of brainstorming before I start writing is my favorite part of the writing process, so the temptation is to drag it out and put off the scary step of writing the first words, so I have to be honest with myself about which impulse is ruling me at the moment — is it the impatience to get going on a book that really isn’t ready, or am I lingering too long in my favorite phase? Or is the book truly ready to start?

Right now, I have no doubts. The book isn’t ready to start. I have a lot of work to do, and I don’t know if that will all happen in the next week.

Meanwhile, I saw yesterday that a big-name author has a book coming out with a similar concept. I think what I’m doing with it is going to be very, very different and even will be aimed at a different audience, but you could probably use the same sentence to describe the basic concept for both books. As wacky as publishing is, I don’t know how publishers would react (and I am hoping to at least make a go of traditional publishing with this). They could be in “this is hot, so we want lots more like it” mode so they’d welcome something that’s similar but still different. Or they could be at the point of “we’ve already done a book with that premise” even if the execution is very different.

I guess all I can do is write it and see what happens, and if a publisher doesn’t want it I can always publish it myself.