Writing popular fiction

risk of using a clipping that is being simultaneously developed by another writer, one who—if the idea is saleable-may hit the proper market before you and effectively render your work dated and imitative. The world of writers is not so small that this is unlikely. I know of three different cases where it happened, making the unlucky author's work useless.
    Plot wheels and newspaper clippings can't provide you, either, with a genuine concern for your characters and their situation. For that, your story people and their milieu must come from within you, based on your personal experiences, revolving around lessons and truths you have learned.
    This doesn't mean you must write only about what you have done yourself. Obviously, that would badly limit any writer. "Personal experiences" may include things that have happened to you, to friends, to others you've heard about; things you've learned from books, movies, television, radio, school, and other sources. Everyone is a witches' cauldron of bubbling facts, ideas, images, and memories. You must learn to tap this magical brew and order the unconscious plots within it.
    You can learn to open this inner storehouse in many ways, though I've found
the following two methods to be the most rewarding. I have frequently used both
since sold my first story and recently developed my forty-second novel with the second method.

METHOD ONE: PLAYING WITH EXOTIC TITLES
    A story title is not always dictated by the finished work. Indeed, by spending an hour playing with odd title possibilities, you may gradually generate an entire story idea. Begin by choosing a dramatic or colorful word that will catch a potential reader's interest and which will be the central word of the title you finally arrive at. Man, horse, winter, rain, coat, and similar words would be bad choices, for they are too common and undramatic. Words like death, blood, fear, witch, killer, thief, darkness, prisoner, and sword would be good title beginnings, for each has dramatic potential. With a key word in mind you're ready to begin winging it.
    I've always kept notebooks in which I record all my free-associating for posterity, and I can, therefore, faithfully recall how I generated title and plot for my first published science fiction story. I began with the central word dragon, because it was rich with fantastic, fearful implications. At first, I played at adjectival amplification of that single word, jotting each idea down in a list:
    The Cold Dragon
    The Warm Dragon
    The Dancing Dragon
    The Black Dragon
    The Eternal Dragon
    The Waiting Dragon
    The Dead Dragon
    Steel Dragon
    The Crying Dragon
    When that seemed to be leading nowhere, I tried following the word dragon with various prepositional phrases:
    Dragon in the Darkness
    Dragons on My Mind
    Dragon in Amber
    Dragon in the Sky
    Dragon by the Tail
    Dragon for the King
    Dragon in the Land
    Several of those attempts were good titles but didn't spark my imagination at that time. Next, I tried using a series of verbs with the key word:
    The Dragon Stalks
    The Dragon Watches
    The Dragon Creeps
    The Dragon Feasts at Midnight
    The Dragon Fled
    But none of those were particularly intriguing. I moved on, trying to amplify the title by adding another noun:
    The Dragon and the Sea
    The Dragon and the Night
    The Dragon and the Knight
    The Dragon and the Key of Gold
    Finally, when I tried coupling the key word with other words that seemed at odds with it, I hit on the right track:
    The Weak Dragon
    The Sad Dragon
    The Timid Dragon
    The Tiny Dragon
    The Soft Dragon
    The contrast in the last somehow appealed to me. I began toying with different applications of it:
    The Soft Dragon
    The Dragon Who Screamed Softly
    The Dragon Who Walked Softly
    The Dragon Came Softly
    And finally the title was there, effective because of its slightly altered word order and its contrasts:
    Soft Come the Dragons
    After an hour of word games, I had hit upon a set of words that broke open that inner storeroom and set my mind to racing. In another few minutes, I had an entire plot in mind, concerning an alien world where flying dragons, as insubstantial as tissue paper, are inexplicably able to kill with their gaze. When I chose the proper characters and motivations, those too came naturally, with very little work. The resultant story received a modest amount of acclaim, brought me a couple of dozen fan letters in the years after its publication, became the title story of a paperback collection of