With just that paragraph of ‘concept‘ you can probably get 3-10 pages, maybe more of a story going. You can take the concept out even further, maybe all the way until the main character (and maybe his family?) are about to die / get sucked into the hole…or maybe I (I’m in first-person, you can be whatever you want) decide it is better to give my wife and kids a ‘suicide’ pill combo that will just put us to sleep and we’ll never wake up because that is less horrifying than waiting for a black hole arrive. Go wherever your story takes you.

A Helpful Tool

One of the most important things I ever did was get a spiral notebook and a good pen. For some of you, this might be your iPad or tablet. Or your phone. Or a yellow legal tablet and a pencil. Or maybe just a pocket notebook. I keep mine near me whenever I am at home, because I never know when I will get an idea.

Sometimes the pages have just a sentence or three of an idea I wrote down like “robot dreams of being more than cleaning bot, signs up for a mining gig out past Jupiter”. I got this from watching one of the new Roomba commercials.

Sometimes I have a concept that is 2-3 written pages. Sometimes I go through and find a single sentence here and there and can combine them: Disgraced Vatican bishop and hacker-priest are tasked to perform an exorcism on an AI that thinks it is Satan. During the course of the story, the Vatican has to grapple with whether or not AI’s might have souls, if AI’s could believe in God. (I got this from an entry that said: Skynet meets The Exorcist + another entry that said: Catholic Church has to declare AI’s ‘people’ and they have souls).