When I was very young, my mum gave my sister and I some very hands-on experiences of nature.

She’d take us to the park after school, and we’d catch frogs, toads and newts. We’d take them home and observe them for a few weeks before we returned them to their natural habitats.

Ideas are like frogs. They can be slippery beasts.

Importantly, I also have to be standing in the field in the first place. Poised, ready to spring at the first sign of movement. Giving the world the right kind of attention so I don’t miss the moment of inspiration when it comes.

To stretch this metaphor to breaking point, let’s say you’ve caught your frog (idea). Maybe you sat at your desk for hours researching, or trying things that didn’t work until you finally stumbled on something that did. Maybe it just came to you, seemingly out of the blue when you were busy doing something else.

Either way, you’ve got one, and it feels great! But if you want it to flourish, and actually turn into anything – whether that’s a short story, or a play, or a poem, or an episode of TV – what conditions does it need?

1. Know what you have

Sometimes it is obvious immediately that the story I want to tell would work best as a feature film, or a novel, or a radio drama.

Sometimes I start writing and realise I’ve got it wrong: my short story, for instance, is swelling into something much bigger, richer and more unwieldy.

Some of the questions I ask myself to help work this out:

• How big is the world of this story? Is it expansive or contained?
• How much time does the story need? Do we need to get to know the characters to appreciate the journey they’re going on, or can what I want to say be expressed as a snapshot, by showing only a brief moment in their lives?
• What do I want the experience for the reader/viewer/listener/audience to feel like?

2. Feed it

Most ideas, even if they show up feeling pretty fully-formed, end up being incomplete.

TV, everybody says, EATS story. You need so much more of it than you could ever come up with right at the start of an idea, and it’s only when you’re actually building the episode or the series out, scene by scene, that you notice where the gaps are.

Even with short stories, I find that my best ones usually come from taking one idea and colliding it with another. Let’s take, for example, my story ‘The Savage Chapel’, which won the Cambridge Short Story Prize a few years ago. I’d been commissioned to write something inspired by something in Macclesfield, so I went to visit St Michael’s Church in Macclesfield, which has a chapel called the Savage Chapel. Named after the Tudor Archbishop of York, Thomas Savage, whose heart was buried in the walls (yes, really!), while the rest of his body was laid to rest elsewhere.

It was a great starting point. I started to think about what the ghost of a heart might be like – how would it be different from other sorts of ghosts?

But it wasn’t quite enough. I needed another piece of the puzzle; an idea to meld with this one that would make the soil rich enough to grow a satisfying story. I’d also been thinking a lot about churches, and the ways in which queer people like me are so often excluded by and persecuted in them. I was asking myself the question: how can I reconcile my interest in church history with my sexuality?

My gay Tudor archbishop heart-ghost was born.

3. Set it free

If you’re a perfectionist, the danger is that you’ll hold onto your writing forever, endlessly tweaking and polishing but never actually sending it out into the world.

I find it helps to give myself some hard limits. Perhaps I will allow myself three drafts of a short story, and then I’ll ask a trusted writer friend to read it, to give me an outside eye.

After that, I might do one more draft, and then it can try its luck out in the world as I submit it to competitions, or to magazines or journals who might publish it.

You could tweak forever. But the frog doesn’t really want to live in a tank, endlessly being prodded and poked at.

And when you let it go, you also free yourself to start on something new.