How do each of you generate story ideas?

For my novel, I saw the most vivid falling star I'd ever witnessed. It made a loud hissing noise as it shot overhead. Then I went inside to put down a diary entry. John Fogerty's Premonition was on the cd player. It just went from there.

For my shorts, they all emanate from my night terrors.

I play the what if game out in public - what if that guy in that car can't tell the difference between his turn signal and his cell phone. No, I mean, what if he really can't tell???

What if that doggie is lost but can talk, only it's afraid to say anything. What if...

Lordy, I wish I could get the ideas to go away and leave me alone. I have so many fragments cluttering up my notebooks.

I have no idea where the critters keep coming from. Anything and everything makes me play pretend and start the "what if..." game.

Soccer Mom said:

Lordy, I wish I could get the ideas to go away and leave me alone.
. . .
I have no idea where the critters keep coming from.

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I'm kind of the same way. Ideas just occur to me when I'm not searching for them. I write them all down a list as I think of them.

A story I wrote for a radio trade magazine sort of inspired my novel. After I submitted it, I got to thinking about a "what if" scenario. Then I came up with a story to build around it and started writing it.

I come up with new ideas almost every day, and discard many of them without further thought.

allen

One of the things I've found most fertile for story ideas is wrong guesses.

I'm the sort of person who always has to guess out the plot of a movie, TV show, or video game before it's fully unspooled. As such. I'm often wrong--very wrong. But often, the version that I've guessed is a great story on its own, and ripe for development into an independent work.

Ideas just come to me, usually from things I observe or things I read... or things that just pop into my head early in the morning. I'm afraid of sitting down and trying to generate new ideas; I think I'd get too tempted to quit my day job to try to write stories that corresponded to all the ideas.

One of the short stories I'm working on came from reading a review of a play that starred one of my favorite actresses. I wondered what would have happened had I trekked across the country to see her in that play, and what would have happened had I waited at the stage door to try to meet her. So the story's about a woman who treks across the country to see said play, and the odd things that happen when she's waiting at the stage door.

Another story I just began is based on a guy I've known online for a number of years. He's one of those people in a state of arrested development -- nearly 30 years old but can't seem to move out on his own, hold a job, make friends, etc. I'm oddly fascinated by people like that. I'm writing about what happens when a person like that is physically forced out of his comfort zone.

...And then this afternoon I was in a meeting at work, and we were going over a bunch of reports I'd written about a particular government agency. It hit me just how much stuff I knew about said agency, and I started thinking that I might be able to write a story about someone who works there. Must file that one away for now, before I get overwhelmed.

I call upon the great god, Dizan, for his greater glory and our mutual pleasure.

When Dizan lets me down, everything else pretty much generates ideas. Not always good ones, mind you, but ideas nonetheless. I also find that the more I read, the more that ideas start popping in this Jiffy Popper thingy called my noggin.

When that fails, I meet this guy in an alley back there behind the city jail, over by the railroad tracks. Midnight. Under a thundering sky. Guy's name is Lenny. Always wears a trench coat, a hat pulled down low over one eye. The other eye has a patch on it. Anyway, Lenny, you give him a dollar -- pristine 1966 issue, he takes no others -- he gives you an idea. Hands it over with a hand kind of burned up and scarred looking. Idea comes wrapped up in a wrinkly brown paper bag. Makes kind of a glugging sound when you shake it, sparkles in the light when held just right. Smells like peppermint, gasoline, stars.

Soccer Mom said:

Lordy, I wish I could get the ideas to go away and leave me alone. I have so many fragments cluttering up my notebooks.

I have no idea where the critters keep coming from. Anything and everything makes me play pretend and start the "what if..." game.

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Yeah, that's pretty much me, too.

Although I keep mine in, uh, what's it called? PlotCraft. Well, a notebook initially when I'm and about, but then I transfer everything over to PlotCraft so it's available when I need it. But honestly, I get so many ideas that I only rarely go back to look them up - I've got so many clamoring for attention at any given point in time.

The more time I spend here, the more I come to realize that I'm heavily, HEAVILY character-oriented. My stories come from them, plus fragments of ideas that seem to just drop out of the aether. A lot of it is "It would be cool if s/he could do A, and B is the most expedient way to get there."

For instance, both my MC's are starting out pretty much physically perfect... one used to be a prince and the other used to be a harem slave. One of my goals is to beat them up a little and give them some interesting scars, particularly MC#2, whose original incarnation had a few scars that would make anybody wince. So when I design fight scenes, I ask myself, "how can I hurt them in interesting ways? How can I use this event to burn off some of that perfection and make them more raw?"

In this case, my mind provided "scorpion the size of a small house". Voila, chapter five.

Generally spontaneous combustion.

For my historical, I read things in books that did not make sense, played detective, and came up with a unique historical MC who left very little paper trail.

Well, from other stories and from other characters and from life. I better start writing faster at the rate they're coming, too.

I don't generate them, they seem to follow me around nipping at my heels - pick me! pick me!
Linnea

Depends on what stage I am in the writing.

If I'm trying to come up with a new novel concept (no short stories here, can't do 'em), I smash various world, character, theme, event thoughts together and see which of them creates a story I'm interested in getting lost in for the next couple of years.

If I'm already writing the book, I discover things as they come out on the page. If they work, great. If not, delete delete and start writing again to see what comes out.

As for all the little idea snippets that sprout up during general living (I swear I get a few hundred in my breakfast cereal), those just get tossed in the "simmering pot" in the back of my brain. My idea bits have to mature and stew for a while before most of them are close to ready to use.

I get bored and start thinking "what if".

For instance, I have an hour-and-a-half commute to work. Usually I have library books to read during the trip, but one day I ran out. So there I was, staring out of the window of a subway train that had stopped, and I started thinking.

What if there were no trains?
Why would there be no trains?
They'd all stopped running.
Why would they stop running?
No electricity.
Why would there be no electricity?
The city's been cut off from the outside world, that's why.
Er, OK, but there'd still be trains. They'd just have stopped, that's all.
Not if the people cannibalized them for parts. The people have been cut off from the outside world, remember.
OK, so what's in the subway tunnels, then?
Creatures.
What sorts of creatures?

It was a lot of fun.

Queen of Swords said:

What if there were no trains?
Why would there be no trains?
They'd all stopped running.
Why would they stop running?
No electricity.
Why would there be no electricity?
The city's been cut off from the outside world, that's why.
Er, OK, but there'd still be trains. They'd just have stopped, that's all.
Not if the people cannibalized them for parts. The people have been cut off from the outside world, remember.
OK, so what's in the subway tunnels, then?
Creatures.
What sorts of creatures?

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I'd beta that story


Recently, I found the Suddenly Fiction Challenges useful. I'd read the challenge, let it wander around my brain for a while. Some of them germinate, some don't.
Recently I had one that decided it wanted to be a full-length thing.

Either that, or I'll get a little idea (like what would surveillance be like in 1890?) and allow the idea to grow a plot.

With flash fiction prompts, I found myself spending almost no time at all thinking about the story, but rather, just writing as it came, sorta like channelling. It was bizarre to me how quickly the story came together. It was an enlightening experience, let me tell ya.

Kate Thornton said:

I play the what if game out in public - what if that guy in that car can't tell the difference between his turn signal and his cell phone. No, I mean, what if he really can't tell???

What if that doggie is lost but can talk, only it's afraid to say anything. What if...

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Yeah, what if. That's the way to do it. (money for nothing and your chicks for free. LOL. I just couldn't help that one)

seriously though. I do the 'what if?'

I also just daydream.

One day I looked up from my table at the coffeeshop, and saw a man walking down the sidewalk that looked a lot like my father. Well, my dad passed away back in 93. I started thinking...a man sees his long dead father, and it's really his father. He get's up to go chase him down and talk to him...

Daydreaming, what if, a sentence someone says to me...any and all of those. But when it really comes together is when I mix those in with : Take your character, figure out what is the worst possible thing that could happen to that particular person( lose their job, fall in love, get facially disfgured, find out they are really a coward, have their deepest secret revealed, whatever), and then make sure it happens to them. Put it all together and Bingo!

Malapropisms generate lots of my fanciful ideas: switch the first letters of a short phrase or bungle it altogether. Then there's taking the innocuous and making it icky or creepy. When the Muse breaks from her chains, she comes back with interesting if unidentifiable parts too. I try not to piss her off. :}

IdiotsRUs said:

Take your character, figure out what is the worst possible thing that could happen to that particular person( lose their job, fall in love, get facially disfgured, find out they are really a coward, have their deepest secret revealed, whatever) . . .

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This is kind of how I progressed the plot as I was writing the first draft. I kept saying "What bad thing could happen to him next?" The story grew from there.

allen

My ideas just come to me. They don't sneak up on me either. Well if they do sneak up on me they sneak up on me a hit my in the back of the head with a baseball bat. I'll be reading, or watching TV or just doing some mundane task and I will get some idea, big or small, then I have to write it down and remember somehow before I lose it.

I have my usual genres (animals and self-help), but I like to find new ways to apply those topics to new and unexpected markets.

My usual way is by going out to lunch by myself once a week or so, trusty Writers Market in hand. I thumb through and see if anything unusual pops out at me. I have garnered a few sales that way in mags. I never knew excited.

I also go through their online database looking for markets I would never have considered to be related to my expertise. For example, I just sent out a query to a trade publication focused on a specific business; normally I would have dismissed it out of hand, but I realized that they publish articles on how to deal with workers and customers. Voila! A subset of self-help perfect for a counselor to write about.

I also try to pull as many articles as I can out of a specific idea. For example, I was assigned to write a profile of a miniature donkey farm. When I realized how similar they are to horses, I did some research and was able to adapt three horse-related topics into donkey articles and racked up three more sales. I also have a mainstream publication interested in the topic, although I won't know until March if that's a go.

I'm always on the lookout for interesting people I meet in the course of everyday life, too. I'm a regular writer for a regional mag. so I'm always looking for human interest, and I find it mainly through word of mouth. The best was hearing that a local family had won a night in Cinderella's Castle at Disney World, which turned into a neat profile that was a heck of a lot of fun to write too.

Soccermom, I feel your pain.

Like soccermom I've never had a problem coming up with ideas, just in controlling them. I have a file cabinet overflowing with bits and pieces I have scrawled in notebooks, on scraps of paper, and in my PDA (transcribed to paper, of course). I would have to live to be at least 280 yrs old just to write the ones I've got now ... and that's if no other concept pops into my head while I'm walking down the street, driving to work, talking to someone, etc.

Short answer: I don't know.

Long Answer: I start with titles and/or songs. From there, characters and plots usually percolate until one of them springs on me. For novels, I start with a vague idea and then write an outline until I'm stuck. Then I start on the story. By then, I almost always have ideas for going on. Something about outlines really makes me think.

I also kype stories from poetry and other stories. For example, Stephen Crane's "A Man Said to the Universe" inspired in me a Adams-esque story. Edward Arlington Robinson inspired several stories with his "House on the Hill," "Richard Cory," and "Miniver Cheevy" poems. I've also gotten a few story ideas from SYW. Unfortunately, many of my SYW-inspired stories sound too much like the original. Out of respect for the original author, those stories go unedited and are put in a "practice" folder on my jump drive.