Ask any writer where they get their ideas and you will hear a wide variety of answers. Some will give you specific cases of how they were inspired to write their books. Some will give you funny answers, like they buy them at Walmart.
Most of them will give some variation on EVERYWHERE!
But seriously, they’re everywhere.
You just have to train your brain to notice them.
The truth is there is no one single way that writers (or even an individual writer) finds their ideas. For example, my various books series have been inspired by the following:
- A fake reality TV show title
- My own beach-inspired fantasy
- A magazine spread of snake-themed accessories
- The writing prompt for an anthology
But I’m going to share some tips below that hopefully help you figure out how to find your own story ideas.
Keep an Inspiration List
Have somewhere that you keep a list of anything and everything that pops into mind. A book you read and adored, a funny piece of conversation you overheard, a character/person you wish existed, your favorite story tropes, names you like, cool titles, etc.
I call mine the Spark File. Here are some of the random things on it:
- Madison Maguire
- My So-Called Summer
- Girl whose boyfriend died abroad
- Bad Authors
- Cinderella meets Harry Potter
- Punk rock princess
- Party of the year
- Ruby’s daughter
- “Get that donkey, he looks lonely.”
- Snowed in
- Grandma’s list
- Playing a character to survive HS
Make sure this list is something you have access to at all times. It could be in a physical notebook or even just an ongoing note in your phone. (My personal tool of choice is Notion.)
Having this list and adding to it regularly will encourage your subconscious to look for things to add to the list. Before you know it, your list will be overflowing.
Practice Turning Sparks into Ideas
Force yourself to create story ideas from various sources. These could be writing prompts, story idea generators, news articles, random objects, games you play… Anything, really.
Just pick something and try to come up with a story that involves that source.
In the same way that keeping a list encourages your subconscious to look for idea sparks, practicing making stories out of seeming non-story material trains your brain to realize that anything (seriously, ANYTHING) is a potential story.
Try it right now. Pick one of these assignments, and come up with a story idea:
- Go to a news site (like the NY Times, BBC News, or CBC news), scroll to the fourth story on the page, and write an idea to go with the headline
- Go to Reedsy’s prompts blog, navigate to the third page of prompts, and write an idea about the third one down on that page
- Go Google.com, click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” (or whatever it spins to when you hover) button, and write an idea about the first thing that shows up on the results page
- Go to your messaging app, look at your most recent emojis list, and write an idea that involves the top three
The more you practice turning inspiration into idea, the more your brain will be open to anything and everything becoming an inspiration.
Let Your Subconscious Take Over
As humans, we do a lot of thinking with our frontal lobes. We use the logical abilities of our conscious minds to solve tangible, everyday problems.
But that frontal lobe often gets in the way of our creative thinking. (My subconscious just typed that as creativing and I think that’s ironically appropriate.)
To get the subconscious working, we usually have to take steps to get the conscious mind out of the way.
Meditating is one way. Sit in silence (or with non-distracting music playing) and let your mind drift. Let your subconscious take over. Because your subconscious is the source of your creative work. Taking a step back and telling your conscious mind to move aside allows the things that are percolating in your subconscious to bubble up to the surface.
Moving is another. Physical activity, even if it’s just getting up to walk around the house, is great for breakthroughs. When you’re moving, you kind of have to focus your mental energy on that. So you don’t, you know, fall to your death. (That’s evolutionary advantage at work right there, Mythfits.)
With your conscious brain engaged in either physical activity or peaceful meditation, your subconscious is free to do what it does best: creativing.
Read More Fiction
The more you read, the more comfortable you get with the structure of storytelling and the more you understand how it works. And the more you understand storytelling, the more you’re going to recognize when a writer is setting something up for later in the story. Which means you’re going to have an expectation for how it’s going to pay off.
When you finally get to the payoff, maybe the writer decided to do things differently than you expected. But that’s a good thing! Because your expectation is actually a story idea. It’s the way you thought the story should go, which means that’s the way YOUR story WOULD go.
I first knew I wanted to be a writer when I started reading fiction and wanting the characters to do or say things differently.
So one of the ways you can start coming up with ideas is to read works by other writers and think about how you think the story is going to turn out. Which is basically writing your version of that writer’s story idea in your head.
Now, I’m not saying to take that idea and write it. You don’t want to directly use another writer’s idea in your own story because copyright (although I will talk in my next post about how you can ethically draw inspiration from another work), but this is definitely a step in the direction of thinking like a writer.
And once you’ve learned to start thinking like a writer, you won’t be able to turn off the flow of ideas. Even when your list starts numbering in the multiple hundreds—not that I have any experience with that…
It may sound like a joke, but ideas are literally everywhere (even at Walmart). You just have to train your brain to look for and recognize them.
Hopefully these tips help.
If you want to dive even deeper into how to find ideas, check out these other resources:
- A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young
- My All About… series on YouTube, in which I share the inspiration behind Oh. My. Gods., Forgive My Fins, Sweet Venom, and Darkly Fae.
- How to Turn an Idea Into a Story
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