You’ve just finished the final draft of your current project and sent it off to your editor. Congratulations! After taking a well-deserved break it’s time to get on to that next story. You sit down and stare at the blank page in front of you. You wrack your brain for a kernel of an idea, but the inspiration well has gone dry. Panic begins to set in.
Does this sound familiar? Every writer has been there at one time or another, but don’t worry. I’ve got your back. Here’s five of my favorite methods to spark new ideas and fan the flames of creativity.
1. Read Headlines
One of my top ways to generate ideas is to comb through headlines for something odd or inspirational. I look for things that stand out. You never know what kind of weird and wonderful things might pop up.
If something catches my eye, I’ll give the article a quick scan to see if there’s any meat on the bone I can work with. Sometimes I don’t go any further than the headline. If the reporter has provided a great hook in the banner, it can be enough to fire up my imagination.
Most people don’t get a daily newspaper anymore, but fear not. There are plenty of online news sources. Most news websites have an offbeat or odd news category of some type. That’s where I usually find the best material.
2. Dig Up the Past
Sinking a shovel into your own history can expose some long-forgotten gems. I’ve taken a trip down memory lane more than once when looking for characters or situations that might make a good story.
Think back to your childhood and try to remember your first day of school or the first time you drove a car. We all have memories we go back to regularly, but I like to unearth the people and situations I haven’t thought about in years. Looking back through the lens of time and experience gives me a very different perspective to work from.
If you can remember your dreams, tap into those as well. Mine are usually a hodge-podge of random images, people, and things that never happened, but some of them are fertile ground where stories have germinated. One example of this is my short story The Waking Room. I didn’t dream I was in the story, I dreamed I was writing it.
3. Friends and Family
If your family is anything like mine, then you’re in luck. There is no shortage of drama and strange twists that could lead to a good story. Pull on a few threads and see what unravels. Talk to your older relatives and climb into the family tree. You never know what kind of fruits and nuts might be hiding in there!
Go a layer out and question your friends. Most people are happy to talk about themselves when given the chance. They’ve probably experienced things that you haven’t and will express them in a different way than you would. That different voice can add color that might inspire you.
A word of warning when dealing with stories from real people—change the names and some of the details to avoid future conflicts. You’re just looking for inspiration here, not a fight.
4. Get Out of the House
This one might seem obvious, but when we’re staring at a blank screen it’s easy to forget we have the option to get up and leave. There’s a whole world outside the door that’s chocked full of characters and stories just waiting to be discovered. Unchain yourself from the desk and explore it.
I’ll admit, I’ve found some of my best character ideas while sitting in a local bar. Sometimes I take my laptop with me, plant myself in a corner, and take in the life going on around me. I try to pay attention to conversations, facial expressions, and body language. When I can’t hear a conversation at another table, I’ll try to guess what they’re talking about based on how animated they’re getting.
If you’re not comfortable hanging out in bars, go to wherever people gather. Parks, malls, libraries, museums—it doesn’t matter. Just get out of your private space and your own head for a while.
5. Play the “What If” Game
I saved the “What If Game” for last because it’s one of my favorites. I could write a whole post on this, and in fact I have. Here’s a link to the full WITS article on the game. Basically, it’s a game of possibilities conjured up by looking at the world through the warped lens of what is best described as a funhouse mirror.
What I like to do is look around and pick an everyday object. How is it normally used? What if it was used in a different way—the crazier the better. A good example would be to go into your kitchen and ask, “What could a killer use to take their next victim?” Eliminate the obvious things like knives and other sharp objects. Heavy pots and pans don’t count either. Also, think about what could you use to defend yourself?
Once you have your object and how you might use it ask the question, “And then what happens?” Keep asking this question until something sticks and a story is born.
Final Thoughts
While none of these methods are earth-shattering, they are effective at getting me out of a creative rut and on to the next project. The whole purpose of them is just to wake up my imagination and get me moving again. I hope they do the same for you!
How do you generate new ideas for your next writing project? Have you found the key that unlocks your creative side? Share your ideas and experiences in the comments below.
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About Bob
Eldred Bird writes contemporary fiction, short stories, and personal essays. He has spent a great deal of time exploring the deserts, forests, and deep canyons inside his home state of Arizona. His James McCarthy adventures, Killing Karma, Catching Karma, and Cold Karma, reflect this love of the Grand Canyon State even as his character solves mysteries amidst danger. Eldred explores the boundaries of short fiction in his stories, The Waking Room, Treble in Paradise: A Tale of Sax and Violins, and The Smell of Fear.
When he’s not writing, Eldred spends time cycling, hiking, and juggling (yes, juggling…bowling balls and 21-inch knives).
His passion for photography allows him to record his travels. He can be found on Twitter or Facebook, or at his website.
In an autobiography, the author is the story so there is no such thing as 'too much'. In fiction however, the author's presence can sometimes become too obvious, to the detriment of the story.
I don't know about you, but when I read fiction, I want to be carried away to another place and time. I want to meet new, larger-than-life characters who do things I could never manage myself. It's just me and the story.
When the author intrudes, however, all I get is 'aren't I funny? aren't I cool? aren't I clever?' To which my answer is inevitably...no. I want to read the story, not the author's ego fest.
'But how can we not be part of the story?' you ask. 'Everything we write ultimately comes from us!'
And that is true. Every thought, word, and deed that we write about springs from how we see ourselves and the world around us. That part is inevitable. Even when we write about things that completely contradict our personal values, those values were still the point from which we diverged.
Infusing our values
To give you an example, in Vokhtah I created an alien culture in which every creature was some degree of sociopath. As someone with a wee bit too much empathy, I was constantly having to edit out the bits where my instinctive response made them too 'nice'.
Most of the time, however, we infuse our values into our work without even being aware of it. That's simply how we see the world.
Two famous works of fiction that illustrate this point beautifully areAtlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, and A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens created a hero who sacrificed himself for another, an act of nobility that still brings a lump to my throat. By contrast, Ayn Rand created a character who was noble because he embodied the ideals of capitalism.
As a 'progressive', I found myself arguing with Ayn Rand the whole way through the book. Nevertheless, the story was persuasive enough to make me question my own, long held views and beliefs.
The power of persuasion
Why were both stories so persuasive? The answer is simple. Both authors genuinely believed in the values and world view they presented in their fiction, and Readers responded to it.
That ability to persuade is the super power we authors wield. But only if we allow the story to be front and centre. If we project too much of ourselves into the narrative, it stops being a work of fiction and lurches towards autobiography, or worse, a dry treatise on philosophy, neither of which is particularly persuasive. Or immersive.
Yet isn't that precisely what fiction is supposed to be all about?
So how, exactly, do we create stories that are both persuasive and immersive?
One technique which has been done to death in writing circles is ‘show don’t tell’. In theory, the author is supposed to let the Reader see, hear, and feel the action for herself. I have no problem with the theory, but the implementation is often too painful to read. I don’t want to know every. single. trivial. boring. detail in a scene. I don’t want to know every time the protagonist scratches his rear, or rubs his nose. I only want to see-hear-feel those things that are important to the story!
Relatable characters
Another thing authors could do is to avoid first person POV [point of view] unless they are sure they are not going to fall into the trap of identifying with the protagonist. Sadly, that is very hard to do when you’re constantly writing ‘I did, I saw, I felt, I thought...blah blah’. Even with the best of intentions, many writers end up creating a character who is the version of themselves they want others to see.
I cannot tell you how many stories I’ve read in which the protagonist is facing a life-or-death fight, and instead of focusing on the fight, he thinks about things that make him appear ‘cool’. Blasé quips might work for Han Solo [Star Wars], but it rarely works in books.
The opposite of the non-heroic hero is the earnest protagonist who is so busy being ‘honest’ that he/she comes across as a self-indulgent navel gazer. Curiously, seeing the protagonist from the inside this way usually highlights the flaws in his/her character without revealing many endearing characteristics. As a result, the Reader is given few reasons to care about the character.
Problems with point of view
In fairness, I have to say that first person POV can be done well, but it isn’t the easy option so many new writers think it is. If anything, it’s the hardest. ‘Me, me, me’ issues aside, in first person POV, the protagonist can only know what he/she sees directly. That means the author has to get very creative in order to present vital information that the protagonist cannot know. That’s hard.
Of course, third person POV is not immune to these pitfalls either, it’s just a bit easier to avoid them. Instead of having to write everything from the perspective of one character, the writer has the option of presenting information through the eyes of multiple characters, each of whom ‘sees’ a different side of the story. It’s a great technique, but the danger is that the author will get carried away and go head hopping.
For those who don’t know, head hopping occurs when the point of view keeps jumping from one character to the next, often with no way for the Reader to know who is doing/saying/thinking what. Instant confusion. Confuse the Reader enough, and they will fall out of the story. And you can’t be persuasive if the Reader gives up and stops reading, can you?
The story comes first
I don’t believe in hard and fast rules when it comes to writing because what works for one writer may not work for another, and the difference between the two is often very subtle. The only thing I would say with any certainty is that the story must come first. It’s not just a vehicle for us to tell the world what we think. Good stories have a life of their own because they transcend what one person, the author, may think, and instead say something important about all people.
Good stories are universal.
Have you discovered too much of an author’s voice in a story? Do you notice point of view plays into author intrusion?
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About acflory
acflory is a science fiction writer from Australia who's passionate about technology, politics, psychology, pets, biology, gaming, music, and food. All of those passions seem to end up in her writing which is an eclectic mix of hard and social science fiction. Hard, because everything she writes about is based on some fact, no matter how obscure, and social, because she loves to explore what it means to be human, even when she's writing about aliens.
I have been writing for more than a decade now. As a self-published author, one of the great benefits is the capacity to put out a far greater volume of writing. Indeed, many self-pub business models require rapid release. Now, there are many ways to achieve this level of output. The easiest, and least desirable, is to simply not care much about your output. Write fast, skip revisions, and cross your fingers. I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU DO THIS! It takes a very skilled, and very lucky, author to produce quality work in this way.
Another way is to simply keep your butt in the seat and just churn out the words, polish them, rinse, repeat. This is, broadly speaking, the ideal method. But it takes more time, dedication, and discipline to manage this than many people have to offer. I certainly struggle with it.
However, I have good news! There is a middle way. If you care about quality, but don’t have the capacity to write the amount of raw, polished output you’d like, then you just need to learn to find a use for every scrap of writing you do. If no idea is wasted, you’ll be amazed how much your creative output increases.
There are a number of ways this can be done, but I’ve come to call my method “The Bad Idea Exercise.” And the flowers that have grown out of that particular pot of fertilizer have taken a number of forms. But to get them growing, you must prepare the soil.
Transplanting the Seedlings
This is the simplest part of the process. What you need to do is create a folder wherever you keep your clippings. This can be one folder for everything, one per series, or even one per title. The important thing is that it is quickly accessible. I like to have a file already waiting for me in the folder for a new series, even if it is blank. The fewer obstacles or delays, the better. This file will be most important during two phases of writing:
Brainstorming and Revision
During brainstorming, in theory, every idea you don’t pick during the ideation process could go in the bad idea file. I personally like to keep it to the ideas that had some merit, had some meat on the bones, but were disqualified for some reason. Maybe they were too simple. Perhaps too complex. Maybe too out of character for the intended cast, or too inappropriate for the tone of the setting. Whatever the reason, if I liked the idea but couldn’t make it work? Into the bad idea file.
On the other side of the drafting process, you’ll want to have the file open and ready during a revision. If you run into a conversation that goes on too long, or a dynamite line that's just not right for the moment or the character? Clip it out and drop it in the file. I find this actually helps streamline the revision process.
It is a lot easier to kill your darlings when you know what you’re actually doing is transplanting them into a place where they will potentially be the star of another tale.
It won’t take long to start to collect a healthy pile of dislodged lines and scenes. Now you just need to wait until the right moment to make something of them.
Raising the Crop
So you’ve just finished a book. You’re looking for some inspiration. Now’s the time to dive into that bad idea file. If you’re like me, you’ll find that the fragments inside fall into one of a small collection of categories.
First are the kinds of ideas that are either too thin to carry a full novel or too problematic to finish out a lengthy plot without hitting a hitch. These are ideal candidates for short stories.
The first two years of my Patreon releases were entirely composed of ideas that I’d deemed unworkable for longer stories.
While a cool idea might run out of steam if you try to push it past 50,000 words, it is not unreasonable to make a short story that is all premise.
Saving the Seedlings
A few thousand words exploring the concept, ending with the implication of adventures to come, is a great little nugget of a story. And if a plot concept is doomed to run face-first into a brick wall, you can simply wrap up a short story before the unfortunate connotations come along. Many love stories wouldn’t work as a “happily ever after,” but they can certainly work as a “happily for now.”
If I’m going to champion this technique, I should show my receipts. I’ve written quite a few fantasy stories, and dragons are a particular favorite topic. For better or worse, my primary fantasy series, The Book of Deacon, is one of my more serious settings. If I have a goofy, gaggy idea, I might not be able to use it in the Book of Deacon without it clashing. And let me tell you, I’ve had some wacky ideas for dragons.
Creating Alternative Stories
On one particular occasion, I became fixated on the concept of dragons with non-standard hoards. As adorable as it would have been to include a scene where Myn (my main dragon) starts raiding bedrooms, it just isn’t a good fit. So into the bad idea file it went, half a scene about a big dragon who hoards pillows.
Flash forward a few months and I needed an idea for a Patreon Short for the month. There’s the pillow hoarder scene. Divorced from the Book of Deacon setting, it needed context. How does a dragon even get pillows? It’s not like pillows big enough for a dragon are just lying around. He must have them custom made.
So now, rather than kidnapping princesses, he’s kidnapping tailors and seamstresses. And instead of plundering gold and jewels, he’s plundering fancy cloth and feathers. A few more minutes of gap-filling and I end up with a tale of a knight who sets out to slay a dragon but ends up starting a business selling garments the army of tailors make out of his worn-out pillows. All from a few sentences that I ditched from another story.
Here’s another one. I wrote an urban fantasy about a guy whose shadow is replaced by an other-worldly creature (Shards of Shadow). In early drafts of the book, I had the POV bouncing back and forth between the human and the shadow from the very beginning. It quickly became clear it would make for a better story if our hero and the audience witnessed the reveal of the specific nature of his problem at the same time. But now I had all of these scenes from the shadow’s point of view that no longer fit in the story. I clipped them out and put them in the bad idea file.
Marketing Material
Once I was in a lull in releases for that series, I popped open the file. A little more connective tissue and I had a side story that explained one or two minor curiosities in the first book and built heaps of character for the shadow. Because it was a companion to the already-released series, I didn’t have to do a bunch of redundant setup or description. Now I had a fun little tale that could serve as something like a newsletter sign-up perk. Something like this that requires knowledge of the story, is always useful to reward fans of the series who want just a little bit more.
And this reveals one of the hidden superpowers of this technique. Scenes built from the bad ideas clipped out of a story still have the DNA of that story. This makes them prime fodder for marketing material. Mid-story stuff is great for newsletter sign-up perks, as I said. They could also be sent out as newsletters, or used as blog content. Things cut from the prologue, abandoned flashbacks, or cut backstory can be free reader funnels to post or release and attract people to the series. But it is always wise, before sending these things out to paying customers, to see if they’re actually ready.
Ripening The Fruits
None of this is worth doing if it fails to produce a story people want to read. As traced out in the earlier examples, the secret to filling out a story fragment to a full story is asking the questions a reader would ask and making sure either the answer is available or the mystery is enticing. Who is this character? Why are they doing what they’re doing? If these answers aren’t contained in the story, and they aren’t the sort of thing the reader can figure out from the in-story clues, then you’ll have to build that out. Likewise, you need to learn about their goal, their stakes, and the challenges/obstacles/villains along the way.
Satisfying Conclusion
The other thing to consider is if the story reaches a satisfying conclusion. This can actually be the most complex part, because “a satisfying conclusion” is not the same as “the end of the journey.” One of my stories that has been a hit with the fans was built up from the abandoned idea “what if post apocalyptic robots, but nice?” This was the actual phrasing in the bad idea file. It was a concept I nixed from Big Sigma, and it ended up as a story called Wasteland. The story ends with things looking up, and the possibility of our heroes finding other survivors. It feels like the beginning of something, not the end of something. But it is the beginning of something the reader can imagine. It isn’t a cliffhanger, it is an open door. And that’s the kind of point that can end a story without the reader feeling cheated. … Provided something happened along the way.
Planting Possibilities
This is actually another example of something that’s trickier to pinpoint about a short story than it is about longer pieces. Part of what makes the previously mentioned conclusions satisfying is if they are the result of satisfying actions or investigations within the story. While I stand by the statement that a short story can essentially be all premise, that premise has to unfold the first few layers of an enticing mystery.
Planting a pile of possibilities in the mind of your reader, with just enough information to give their imagination something to tug at and play with, is meaty enough to satisfy. Describing a bunch of interesting things but not giving the reader something to do with them? Probably not. So you can follow the standard three act structure: get the character stuck in the tree, throw rocks at them, and get them down again. Or you can spend your word count giving your audience a palette and filling it with beautiful colors of paint, then hand them a paintbrush and send them on their way. Either will work, but the real trick is knowing when you’ve hit the mark.
With any luck, you’ll get used to the process of sprouting dubious clippings into indubitable blossoms. And then there’s the endgame.
The Best Worst Case
Hopefully I’ve illustrated the value in hanging onto your “bad” ideas and gussying them up. It’s a profoundly efficient way to increase your output without greatly increasing your workload. Once you get the knack of it, you’ll start steadily generating juicy little short stories for all sorts of purposes, from marketing to reader rewards. And if you’re like me, some of those ideas will swell and mutate into novellas or full-fledged novels. But there is a scenario you should be aware of. As you mature as a writer, the number of bad ideas produced by any given session may start to dwindle. And as you get better at utilizing those scraps you’ve been filing away, the file will start to empty out. So there is the chance you’ll end up with an empty Bad Idea File. But I’m prepared to say without fear of reprisal that any given tactic that leads to the worst case of “I’ve run out of bad ideas” is probably a pretty safe bet.
Do you have a Bad Idea File? What do you do with scenes you don't use? How do you free your darlings?
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About Joseph
Joseph R. Lallo took a crooked path to authordom. He was educated at NJIT, where he earned a master’s degree in Computer Engineering, and paid his bills in the world of Information Technology until Sept of 2014, when he finally became a full-time storyteller. The international bestseller The Book of Deacon defined his early career, and he has since written dozens of novels, short stories, and novellas. These include the critically acclaimed Steampunk series Free-Wrench and the thrilling sci-fi adventure saga, Big Sigma.
Outside of writing, he has co-hosted multiple self-publishing podcasts over the years, including the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing podcast.
