We all know the feeling. When you’ve just finished writing a story you love, and you can’t stop thinking about it. It feels alive. It feels vibrant. You’re a little shocked that it came out of your head, but there it is, real as anything. A story you’re proud to call your own.

And then the next thing you write… just isn’t it. You can’t explain it, can’t pinpoint it, but the invisible magic that captures your heart just isn’t there. And you have no idea why.

Though it feels strange to admit, liking your own work is an integral part of being a writer. By the time a story’s finished, you’ve read your own words a thousand times, pondered over every choice, every phrase, every contraction, every comma. And when your story finally sits there, breathing on its own, complete, functional, usually nothing like you pictured it when you started, you know when you love it, and you know when you don’t.

Some ideas flow and shift and dance onto the page, while others stick and grind, taking weeks to coax into something that looks like progress. But no matter how long it takes, it still feels like an unknowable ingredient gets added somewhere along the way. And, no matter how hard you try, some stories have it, and some just don’t.

So what is it that makes one story sing while another just sits there? How can something so elusive be so obvious when it’s missing? And how can you bring that magic to the next thing you write, if you don’t know where it comes from in the first place?

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Before we go any further, I’ll let you know right now – I don’t have the answer. I have yet to sell my soul at the crossroads for that juicy piece of advice, though I’m sure I’m not the only one who has strongly considered it.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic potion, or a formula to guarantee greatness. Grand idea + rough first draft + 2 week thaw + ruthless edit + season with salt = a great story. Sounds brilliant, right? But the truth is, I don’t know why some stories dance while others don’t. Why some characters steal your heart while others are only a one-night stand.

But I do know what to do when that elusive magic is playing hide and seek. How to tackle a story that feels lost and static, smaller than it could be. And how to keep going when it feels like the spark has gotten lost somewhere along the way.

So, let’s give the impossible a go. Delve into the art and process of creating a story, and see if we can find where the magic is hiding.

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One place the magic isn’t

To start with, let’s take a look at where the magic is not: in your ideas.

At countless book signings and convention panels, you’ll hear budding writers asking their heroes, “How do you come up with your ideas?” which is code for “Tell us where you found the magic, so we can find it too”. And, the often repeated, yet ultimately unhelpful, answer is “they just come to me when I’m not thinking”.

And while yes, coming up with ideas is an integral part of the task of writing, I actually believe it’s the least important step in the whole process.

Allow me to explain.

Far too many years ago to think about, while studying history in sixth form (12th grade for any non-brits out there), I had two distinctly different history professors. One, let’s call her Linda, managed to make the incredibly dull topic of Britain in the 1600s riveting, which, for a group of bored 17yr olds who just wanted to update their Myspace and play Neopets at lunch, is a pretty impressive feat. The other professor, let’s call him Jack, had the far easier task of teaching us the salacious and bloodsoaked history of the French Revolution, all guillotines and treason and storming of the Bastille. But, due to his teaching style and, dare I say it, storytelling style, Jack managed to make one of the most exciting periods of French history mind-numbingly dull, while Linda made Oliver Cromwell a blockbuster hit.

The reason I’m talking about history professors is to illustrate that it’s not the topic or the idea that makes or breaks a story – the magic lies in the telling.

A good writer can take a lousy idea and make it great. Just as a lousy writer can take a great idea and hit it over the head with a shovel. Ideas in themselves aren’t magic. They don’t spring miraculously from the ether and bestow great stories on whoever happens to catch them.

They’re the spark of creativity, the things that make you pause and think… what if? They make you smile, they make you shudder, they make you race to find a pen. And they’re as abundant as there are thoughts in your brain.

The only difference between an idea and a good idea, is how excited you are to write it.

An idea can be mundane, or vague, or completely outlandish. It can be a character, a scene, an entire trilogy or simply a name. As long as it grabs your attention, makes you excited to see what happens, makes you want to read the story you’re trying to tell – then it’s a good idea.

Let me show you what I mean.

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An excercise in ideation

For this excercise, I want you to look around your room, wherever you happen to be, and pick the first object your eyes land on. Don’t think too hard; just choose the first thing that jumps out at you, no matter how ordinary or abstract it may be. Got one? Good. Now spin around and pick a second object. Again, no thinking about it, just the first thing you see, be it a half-finished coffee, a pile of unanswered mail, or the park bench you can see through the moving bus window. You can probably see where this is going, can’t you.

Now you’ve got your two objects, you’re going to put them together in a story.

Don’t worry about trying to make it interesting. Don’t worry about trying to make it good. This is just an exercise in letting your mind wander, and going with it on whatever journey it wants to take.

You’ve probably ended up with some pretty obscure objects; a basil plant and an overdue bill. Yesterday’s laundry and a novelty stapler. The point is, it doesn’t matter how obscure or mundane your objects are; have a play around and see where they take you.

For me, I can see a miniature souvenir violin and a laminated world map. So, let’s see what we can come up with.

Being a fantasy nerd at heart, my first thoughts are of halflings and hobbits. Miniature creatures who wander the world, playing songs to sleeping children while trying to collect their dreams. Or maybe we go modern, and send a young violinist on a journey to discover the country of her ancestors, looking for the missing pages of her grandfather’s last great symphony. Or maybe we try a historical tale; a young Victorian girl loses everything when her father is arrested and sent on a convict ship to Australia. Left penniless and alone, she is forced to play for her supper in a dark and dangerous city that is all too ready to eat her alive.

Now, none of these ideas are earth-shattering. None of them scream, “and the Hugo award goes to”. But already, in just a few lines, just a few minutes of playing with the mundane, we’re starting to have fun with it. To mess around. To take what is initially a pretty garbage starting point and make it something more. To dig in and find the story buried under the surface. The story I want to tell.

Any idea, even long-lost Captain Basil and his journey to pay an overdue parking ticket, has the potential to be great if you take it apart and find the thing that makes you want to write it. I wholeheartedly believe that you should write the stories you want to read, and that starts with finding an idea that makes you wonder how it ends.

The point is that ideas can come from anything and everything. And a good idea is nothing more than a story that captures your imagination.

The idea is not where the magic comes from. It’s what you do with that idea that matters.

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The process of turning nothing into something

So, if the magic doesn’t come from the ideas, then it has to come from the work. The ‘one word after the other’, slow, arduous, sometimes soul-crushing process of taking your story and trying to pin it down – using words that never seem to fit, in a language that has too few letters, on a page that, no matter how much you write, always feels half empty.

The process must hold the key.

There are many tried and tested techniques for creating a solid writing process, which you’ll find reiterated in almost any book on the craft. The flippant ‘formula’ I wrote in the first paragraph sums it up quite nicely:

Good idea + rough first draft + 2 week thaw + ruthless edit + season with salt = a story

Getting the words down. Writing with the door closed. Giving you work some time to sit. Coming back with fresh eyes. Killing your darlings. These are all essential steps to writing a good story. Skills honed over years of trial and error that come together to create the work of writing. Our exercise earlier, coming up with ideas, that’s the fun part. But it’s the process that makes the story. Without it, they’re just dreams of books that never were. The perfect story that no one will ever read.

But which step holds the key to the magic we’re seeking?

Well, it sure as hell isn’t the first draft.

I’ll be the first to admit that my initial drafts read like fever dreams told by barely conscious narrators with a loose grip on the English language. A scattering of thoughts, scenes, and lines of dialogue thrown haphazardly together and stuck with duct tape to a rickety and unstable surface. But heavy-handed metaphors aside, no one writes a great story the first time they try. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. Or perhaps made that pact at the aforementioned crossroads.

The point of a first draft is to get everything out, bad ideas along with the good, so you can go back and refine it later, pick out the gems from the mess and make it into something new. If you’re too critical, too worried about writing something good, you can stifle the ideas as you try to get them down. Focus too much on being perfect, and you can lose the thread of where the story was going in the first place.

Some things you write will be good; they might even make it into your final piece unchanged, but you need to give yourself the freedom to write badly, write garbage, write things that make you wince to read and move on. Making a thing better is so much easier than making it in the first place.

Editing, then, must be the secret. The slow process of cutting your story to ribbons and piecing it back in a way that makes it look intentional. It is the last step left, after all. And if that’s where this discussion ends, if we conclude that editing holds the key to creating a great story – then I don’t entirely disagree.

Editing is a sort of magic. Stripping away the excess and finding the story beneath. It’s a skill. It’s an art. It can be crushing when the lines you love get sent to the trash. Infuriating when you can’t find the right words and rewrite one sentence over and over again until you no longer have any idea what you’re trying to say. And Amazing when you sit back and read a story you had no idea you were writing.

But there in lies the problem. How – when you go through the same editing process for two different stories – can one story come out vibrant while another is just a story? Even if we know that editing is the key to turning an idea into something more than the sum of its parts, how can the result be so drastically different each time we do it? Is it down to the effort you spend on a piece? The time you put into it? The blood, sweat, tears, and coffee you pour into your words? Or is there something else we’re still missing?

The same person does the same thing over and over again and creates something different every time. It’s enough to send anyone insane.

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The factor we’re forgetting

But maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. There is, after all, an important factor we’re forgetting.

The reader.

Because that’s who really matters, at the end of the day. Writing something you’re proud of is all well and good, but being able to convey that story to another – to one who doesn’t know what you’re thinking, can’t see the characters the way you do, can’t feel your setting or hear your voice – that’s the rel goal. If they can find the magic between the words, then you’ve achieved what you set out to do.

And it’s not always the stories you think are good that resonate with your readers. Sometimes, it’s the ones you question that find a new home amongst people who understand what they are better than you.

Perhaps you’ve simply read your words too many times. The passion has become a day job, the wonder reduced to work. Editing, cutting, rewording and reworking until you don’t know what you’re looking at anymore. Or perhaps you’re reading between the lines and imagining the story you wanted to write instead of the one you did? Reading your intention rather than what’s actually on the page.

In order to step back from your work, to give it room to breathe, to dissect what it is when you’re too close to see it, there is one thing every good story needs – a second opinion.

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Seeking a second opinion

Like any form of literary critique, constructive criticism, or friendly piece of advice, take anyone’s opinion of your work with a heavy dose of salt. But seek it out nonetheless.

Asking for feedback can feel like a dagger to the heart, a nauseating mix of arrogance and self-doubt, while you wait for someone to pick apart the words you so lovingly put together and highlight all the issues you hoped they wouldn’t notice. To slap you off your high horse with a heady dose of humility.

It’s painful to be told your work isn’t as perfect as you thought. Or, as Grant Howitt puts it, “It’s always heartbreaking to discover that (you’re) not the automatic carefree genius (you) dream of being”. But finding out what others think, seeing exactly what flies and what falls for someone who has no personal attachment to your story, can help you refine your work into the best possible version of itself it can be.

While everyone will have an opinion, don’t take them all to heart. Seek out a few people whose opinion you trust and who like and understand the kind of thing you’ve written. And try not to be too wounded when someone doesn’t get it; not every story will resonate with every reader. As Neil Gaiman advises, “When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they’re almost always right. But when they tell you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong”.

Be sure to collect multiple opinions on a piece before you go back to the cutting board. Something one person loves another might hate. An opinion is, after all, just one person’s opinion. You’re free to take it or leave it as you see fit.

But the process of giving up the reigns, sending your work out to the world and seeing what people think of it can give you the detachment you need to see your story with different eyes. To see it how others see it. And find a little of the magic that was hiding there all along.

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In the end, it’s all just magic and mystery. Witchcraft and wonder for a modern audience.

‘Trust in the process’ is such an overused phrase, but it’s really all you can do. Keep doing the work. Keep putting the words down on the page. Keep trying to capture the wonder floating just out of reach. Sometimes, you’ll succeed. Sometimes, you won’t. And most of the time you won’t know why.

The only thing to do is to keep writing.

Move on to the next thing. Write something new. And come back to your fledgling story with fresh eyes, and a mind that’s no longer looking for words to cut and sentences to perfect. Find a friend you trust to tell you the truth, and see if they can spot something you couldn’t before. And be patient. Some stories just need a little time to show you what they’re meant to be.

So keep writing. Keep running around with a butterfly net seeing what you can catch. And don’t be too disheartened when your words fail to fly the way they did before. Because every story is a journey, and if this story isn’t yet ready to sparkle, perhaps the next one will.