Tag: Perpetual Stew

On Prewriting, Part 2

The Writing Lab, 20 September 2025

Hello! Hope everyone is having a great weekend. It’s once again time for The Writing Lab, where I try and share some insights from writing that I’ve developed from writing, both for pay and for fun, for the past thirty years or so.

It was last month that I began discussing one of the first steps of the writing process – prewriting, where you first generate and develop your ideas, as well as plan out how it will be organized.

With this piece, let’s continue this talk about prewriting by concentrating one of the essential parts of the prewriting process: generating and developing premises for stories. I’ll discuss some ideas about how you might wish to approach this process, using some of my own experiences and processes as examples1.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE:] While the advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. You likely will just need to sprinkle some research over it, lol2.

A representation of the whole writing process. Note how prewriting is at the start of the process.

On Prewriting, Part 2: Developing your initial premise

It’s somewhat strange to me I often don’t get the question “where do you get your ideas?” It might be because I haven’t been putting my fiction out in public that much until recent years, so I haven’t had the opportunity to get tired of those questions as maybe those who have been in the game longer.

As I mentioned earlier, this part of the advice comes from my experience, which might be much different from yours. Creativity, by nature, if you’re really using it properly3, is a very individual thing. So, to describe the initial part of my creative process, I want to use a very individual metaphor to describe it. The metaphor I think best describes my own creative process is something I call “The Perpetual Stew.”

rustic hot vegetable stew in clay pot
Photo by Selim Alyz on Pexels.com

Perpetual Stew

Back in the day, they had a lot of names for what I call a perpetual stew: forever soup, hunter’s pot, hunter’s stew, and the like. This would go back to the medieval days when people would have a pot like this above a fire or hearth and cooks or whoever was in charge of such things would continually add food and other ingredients to it over days and weeks and even longer, continually adding in and serving out, like you’d hear about in medieval inns and the like. You’d throw in whatever was around or you could harvest at the time: rabbit, hen, pigeon, maybe some pork if you were lucky, grains of course, and whatever vegetables like leeks, cabbage, and other items to flavor up what was in the pot.

Something similar to this is cooking in my head constantly. I end up dumping in whatever I mentally consume, or perhaps gather, into this mental perpetual stew. And I mean everything.

If you don’t know, I have a vast amount of interests and things I learned about during my life. Earlier when I was a kid, I’d dump the whole lore of Star Wars and my love of space Legos in the pot. Over the years, I would add ancient and medieval history and architecture, chess and game theory, 20th century history and culture, the history of 1980’s and 1990’s indie rock in America, professional wrestling throughout the world, bad movies from America, India, and Africa, military tactics and history, 20th century journalism, years of reporting from newspapers and websites, current events, foreign cultures of all kinds, and of course the fiction from 400 to 500 years of Western civilization and beyond. This is among other things, of course.

Eventually, I started to ladle out some servings from this perpetual stew and use it to create some artistic meals. Long ago and back when I was a kid, I took some of those images of Star Wars and the space Legos I played with as a kid and and use it to cook up a sci-fi fantasy space opera long lost to the vagaraties of time and idle thinking. Then there were a few young adult novels, personal obsessions, and teenage-scenarios that got turned into my first manuscript and the one book that got produced as a result of the now defunct National Novel Writing Month (better known as NaNoWriMo). I’m not sure those books will see the light of day because they would need some rewrites and it would be like pretending I was twenty or thirty years old when I was in fact twenty years older. It’s like another person altogether wrote those two books45.

Of course, simply pulling out ingredients from the stew and slopping them together on a plate or in a bowl doesn’t quite work. What I’ve found has worked is when I ask myself questions about what is in the stew or what I want out of it. I’ve found asking these questions helps focus the premises or hooks of my stories clearly enough that it provides at least the skeleton of my tale before I begin drafting.

Asking Questions

question marks on paper crafts
Photo by Leeloo The First on Pexels.com

I’ll give you two examples from my own creative experience. Back in college when I was studying journalism, I learned about an incident that happened at the New York Post in the early 1990’s where the newspaper’s staff was up in arms about the possibility of a shady parking lot mogul buying the paper. Eventually, the paper ran an entire edition about this person, making it clear the staff were not interested in having him for a boss. The incident ended up scaring this buyer off of buying the Post, although the paper eventually wound up in the hands of Rupert Murdoch, which I don’t think was an upgrade.

That story sat in my perpetual stew for a while when one day, I took it out, so to speak, and began asking whether it might be a good basis for a story I’d long wanted to write about the journalism field. That’s when I began asking questions, in the process adding some new ingredients to the new creative meal.

  • What if we set the story in the more familiar location (for me) of Chicago?
  • What if it was set at a declining major newspaper?
  • What if it was happening right during the 2008 presidential elections and the start of the Great Recession, with financial institutions collapsing all around?
  • What if the events of this journalistic revolt ended up with the founding of an American-created, journalistic-focused Wikileaks?

I blended the ideas together, and soon enough, I was writing my debut novel, The Holy Fool. Much more needed to be done in the prewriting, but those questions solidified the premise and much of the action of the story.

More recently, I asked the question, What would my main character and his news organization be doing right around now, in today’s world? And just like that, I had a sequel on my hands.

For my series The Yank Striker, I had my fandom of the sport of soccer and an affection for the Americans who dared to make the sport their profession. It stayed cooking for a while as I gradually added more knowledge of the world of professional soccer in Europe and the US. One day, I had a question:

  • When we finally have an American who can play as well as Lionel Messi, who might that person be? Then I asked:
    • Who would he be?
    • What’s his background?
    • What type of personality would he need to be a true sport superstar (spoiler, a bit obsessed)?

By the end of those questions, I had my main character and the bare frame of what became The Yank Striker series.

Of course, after asking these questions, you still will likely have a long way to go before being finished with the prewriting process. However, you will have a good idea of both the nature of your story, your premise and/or hook, and what you need to find out before drafting out the story.

Next Time at The Writing Lab:

Next month, we’ll get into developing your characters. Every reader is a person, and people are naturally drawn to interesting people in fiction. We’ll discuss what you might need in a main character, as well as supporting characters as well, as well as how they can drive your story as well.

Until then, take care.

-30-

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  1. As with all pieces of advice I give here, if you have a better or more effective way of doing some of the things I discuss here, absolutely feel free to stick with your systems. Better yet, message me or share them in the comments so I can “borrow” them. 😅 ↩︎
  2. A piece on proper research will definitely have to be a selection for a future Writing Lab piece in this series. Feel free to make any other topic suggestions for a Writing Lab piece in the comments. ↩︎
  3. That means not using AI to write your bloody stories. What’s the point of creativity otherwise? #ButlerianJihad ↩︎
  4. It might be worth another (or rewritten, depending on how much I’ve discussed the entire story before) Writer’s Biography entry to get into the ins and outs of how it all turned out and why I likely wouldn’t consider trying to release them. ↩︎
  5. Or now that I think about it, maybe I’d release them as web-exclusive stories? Why not make use of stuff I created, even if it’s in a throwaway manner? Why not, indeed, as long as I add the caveat that a kid wrote these books and not the current adult version of me? ↩︎

The Yank Striker: A Footballer’s Beginning: A look back at my most recent book

What would an American soccer superstar look like? Not just someone who was a good player, but an actual legendary, world-class player, someone on the level of a Lionel Messi, a Diego Maradona, a Pele? Where would he come from? What would he be like as a person? And what would his path to soccer superstardom look like?

Those were the questions I started to ask myself about a decade or so ago, as my obsession with the sport grew (which I’ve documented before on this site here and here, for example). As much as I loved the American players I’ve cheered on as they played for the US Men’s National Team, or representing there clubs here or abroad, we’ve never had a world-class player, someone who could be considered among the top 10 players in the world. The more I considered the situation, the more the storytelling possibilities of the situation intrigued me.

How the Creative Process Happened

Photo by @rrinna on Pexels.com

I might have mentioned this previously on the page, but for me, my own creative process is a perpetual stew, constantly simmering in my head. For those unaware, the stew, which is also called a hunter’s pot, hunter’s stew, or forever soup, is a concoction you constantly keep cooking in a pot. Ingredients and liquids keep going in to keep the thing going as you continue to serve people from the pot. That’s my creative process – new items keep coming in, I like a mix, and then I ladle it out to serve, so to speak.

In this manner, then, I started to cook up the idea, the concept of this main character. This process would be something entirely differnt to me in this instance. In the fiction I had written before, both published and unpublished, my main characters had shared more than a little resemblance to myself.

However, I knew this main character would be someone very different from myself. Obviously, even though I am a fan of the game, I only played it as a kid and nowhere near at the semi-professional levels, never mind pro levels. The further I went through the process, the further this character drifted away from who I was and toward something unique. And it excited me. First he became a Texas native because it seemed right for a soccer player to be from somwhere that produced so many good players like the legendary Clint Dempsey. Then it made sense for him to have a connection with the college gridiron through his father. And before I knew it, I had the first ever LGBTQ main character I’d ever written.

I stirred all this up with almost a decade’s worth of research into the world of professional soccer (and more since then), and what resulted was The Yank Striker: A Footballer’s Beginning – what will be the first in The Yank Striker book series. I feel more assured that the title of this book is a bit more straightforward than my debut novel, at least. I think it’s a great start to my first, very unique, series.

The Story

As he prepares to graduate from high school, Texas native Daniel John (DJ) Ryan thinks he has his life plans in order. A star wide receiver for the Liberty Rock Park High School football team, he won the state title with his older brother and quarterback Trey Ryan. It makes sense for him to commit to attending Hamilton State University (HSU) just outside Dallas, where he’ll join Trey and their father, championship-winning coach Junior Ryan, for college football glory and a shot at the NFL, with a pro career which could help support him as he pursues the life of an artist later.

Yet, the gridiron is not the only part of DJ’s life. He also plays the other sport known as football – soccer. A talented striker for his high school and a local semi-pro team, DJ finds an artistic creativity and freedom in the sport he doesn’t have anywhere else. And he will have to set the sport aside if he plays for his father.

There’s also the secret he is keeping from all but a few of his closest family and friends. DJ is pansexual, sexually attracted to people regardless of their genders. He also is romatically attracted to more than one person at a time, and unlike his serial philanderer of a father, he is open and honest with all involved.

As he joins the HSU Copperheads, however, two circumstances threaten these plans. First, a chance encounter at a soccer tournament with a English scout turns into an offer for a tryout with Donford FC, a mid-level Premier League club from the East End of London. And then, the possibility of DJ’s personal secrets being revealed threaten his football dreams.

Will DJ decide to stay close to home and family, as well as the familiarity of the gridiron? Or, will he attempt to follow his creative heart across the Atlantic Ocean and into the unknown world of professional soccer?

If You’re Interested…

…in the sport of soccer, family intrigue, and/or LGBTQ fiction, The Yank Striker is absolutely for you.

Essentially, you can probably find it just by Googling “Jason Liegois The Yank Striker,” but if you want faster links, you can check out either the links on the sidebar of my desktop version of this site, or go to my profile page on Substack and click on the “Links” section. If you’re interested, you can pick up the paperback version for $14.95 or the Kindle version for $4.99.

Or, if you happen to visit a book fair or author’s event in Iowa, western Illinois or maybe even Northeast Missouri, you might see me there and ask me if I’ve got a copy to sell and autograph. I’ll be the relatively big guy with a gray beard and I’ll almost certainly be wearing something in purple. You won’t miss me.