Okay, a bit of background. I’ve been writing science fiction short stories (mainly for myself) for a number of years now, and I finally reckon I’m ready to make the leap and try to write something a bit longer. I’m aiming at around 70,000 words or more. Something like that.
Method
I’ve had an idea at the back of my mind for a story for some weeks now, so getting it down on paper will be a good exercise. The method decided to use is to put down the story in a couple of paragraphs, and then seeing about developing characters before going back to the story to flesh it out a bit.
I did this, and hit my first snag as a novelist (so soon?). Basically, once I put my idea, which I thought was so substantial, so intriguing and interesting to a potential reader, down on the page, I hit a problem: there wasn’t much of it. It seems that once you strip away the lighting, sound effects and general FX that you can produce when thinking about a story in the confines of YOUR OWN HEAD, basically it can look like not very much at all. So far from having the idea for a story, I basically feel like I might have to go back to square one with my story. How disheartening!
davidmsteele 
When I wrote my first novel a few years ago, I was also scared that there wasn’t enough plot to justify calling it a novel. The story grew as I wrote though, and not just a little bit. You can outline all you want, but I think you’re always going to discover new things about your story once you start putting it down on paper, and you will continue to do so throughout the entire process.
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That’s a really useful piece of advice. Thanks a lot, Dee.
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