How to Get Your Next Big Idea

Spectacular success is amazing, but most people don’t want to be one-hit wonders. If you’ve had a really good idea, how do you get your next one? How do you turn the smile of fortune into a long career?

My friend KJ Dell’Antonia’s first novel,?The Chicken Sisters, became a Reese’s Book Club pick in late 2020, and landed on the New York Times bestseller list. Her second novel,?In Her Boots, came out this week. She celebrated the launch of?In Her Boots?by giving a draft of novel #3 to her agent.?

I asked KJ for her tips on how to get the next big idea. The good news? Ideas are legion. The bad news: shaping them into something that you want to show the world after a big success is tough. But if you’re willing to work hard, workable ideas will keep coming, letting you build a big flame into a sustainable burn.

As anyone who’s participated in a bad brainstorming session knows, there are lots of ideas in this world. “Getting ideas is easier than following through on them,” KJ says. “For me, finding another sparkly book idea — that always sounds so much sexier than whatever I’m actually writing — isn’t hard. What’s hard is not following every shiny new thing.” Once you have committed to an idea, you want to see it through. So to avoid getting distracted, KJ keeps a couple of pages in the back of her bullet journal to record 1-3 sentences about new ideas or things that strike her. The ideas can all germinate there until her current novel is with an editor.

But then, it’s “pencils down” time. “That’s when starting to play with new things makes sense,” she says. She gives herself a short period of time to catch up on whatever balls she’s dropped in the final stages of writing and editing. And then she commits a certain amount of time to thinking and playing around.?

“I get ideas when I have my butt in the chair and I’m working,” she says. She looks through her ideas. She chases them, writes them down, and sees where they go. “For me, that means taking a notebook and spending a few hours every day staying out of email and offline and being like, ok, I better do something other than sit here and bite my hangnails.”

You also have to be patient. “Not every idea is a good one,” KJ says, and any given novel likely has more than one idea strung together. Many novel ideas start as a situation — why are there two restaurants in this little town with almost the same name? Or, for?In Her Boots, what happens when a cult-favorite author whose personal life is falling apart returns to her New Hampshire family farm? — not a story. There needs to be a problem for the main character, plus the internal drama of what’s keeping them from solving their problems. KJ writes back cover copy — what you’d find on the jacket of the book, succinctly stating the central question — and ends up with a lot of scribbled “what ifs?” She writes out bits and pieces until finally something feels like it works, and she can run with it. “It’s definitely not a perfect process,” she says, “but any process that results in actual books can be the right one for you.”

Your last project will never do the work to finish your next one. But if you want to have a next project, you have to keep trying stuff, and then putting stuff out there. Luck is a fickle thing, and not every project that follows a big success will be as big as the first. But so what? Once you have several projects out in the world, people start viewing them all together, evaluating the whole portfolio. The good news is that most of us do improve at our crafts over time. As momentum grows, luck becomes less necessary. Because it turns out there’s more where that came from.?

PS - I am excited and humbled by the advance praise I’m getting for my next book,?Tranquility by Tuesday: 9?Ways to Calm the Chaos?and Make Time for What?Matters. Check out what people are saying (and consider pre-ordering)?here.?

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