Where do you get your story ideas?
That’s one writers hear often. I don’t know about other scribblers, but I’ll tell you where mine come from. You see, there’s this pantry in my kitchen. Inside the pantry, way in the back, past the outdated, botulism-laced cans of who-knows-what, is a portal. When I’m in need of an idea, I step in the pantry, close the door behind me (to keep out snoops), feel around inside the portal, and grab the first idea that floats by. I withdraw my hand, praying I haven’t inadvertently snagged a Wimplesnort instead, ’cause they stink up the kitchen and cause warts. Only then do I look at the idea, and see if it’s something I can use.
And if you believe that, there’s this land in Florida I’d like to sell you. Only under a few feet of swamp water.
But the above illustration is not all baloney. That entire passage comes wholly from my imagination, and could be the glimmer of an idea fit for a story. Or a novel.
Ideas come from many places, not the least being born whole-cloth from a writer’s devious mind. That’s right. That murky, cobweb strewn mass of grey tissue we call a brain is filled with tidbits, fluff, and useless, unrelated information that all of us have picked up over a lifetime of reading, learning, interacting with others, assimilating data, and trying to make sense of our world.
Sometimes, this data comes together in odd ways. Sometimes, adding 2 and 2 gets you 5 – the gist of an idea.
Story Ideas from What If?
Writer’s jump-start their creativity in many ways. Ever play the “What If?” game?
It’s easy. Just ask yourself “What If?”so-and-so happened. And then attempt to come up with an answer.
- What if you could clone dinosaurs by extracting dino DNA from insects trapped in amber? (Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton).
- What if a family were trapped for the winter in a haunted hotel? (The Shining, by Stephen King).
- What if a scientist stitched together a bunch of cadaver parts and brought the whole to life? (Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley).
My novel-in-progress, Seed, developed from a “What If?” scenario.
- What if werewolves were real?
Of course, pose one “What If?” question, and other questions naturally follow. In the case of Seed, if werewolves were real, where did they come from? What was their origin? Just how would the werewolf legend develop?
Seed is my way of answering that provocative “What If?” question.
More Ways to Find Your Story Ideas
There are other ways writers generate ideas.
- Some writers get ideas from the daily news.
- Others collect bits and pieces of trivia, culled from stories, headlines, T.V., or other sources, and filed away. Periodically they review their collection, pairing odd bits with even bits. Sometimes something clicks, and an idea for a story is born.
- Others may start with a character, develop the character in their minds over time, and see if the character starts living out a story.
- Still others perform writing exercises and see where they take them.
That’s where I came up with the germ of an idea that resulted in my short story “The Last Angel”. One rainy afternoon, bored to tears, I sat down at the computer and typed 20 free-flowing story snippets, as fast as I could type. I put next to no thought into where I was going with this, just cast my fly into the dark waters of my mind and reeled in the first idea that bit.
A year or so later, in need of a story, I dipped into my snippet file. Of my 20 story bytes, most were pure drivel. Others may have potential at some point. Here’s the one I wrote that I eventually developed into “The Last Angel”.
In the Year of Carrion, 2153, four winters after the Arkanian Revolution, I found a reason for living.
She was young and innocent, a slim slip of a girl, with honey blond hair cropped short, and eyes as green as Ireland. Her name was Kaedy.
When I first heard of her, I was near death from pity and disillusionment, malnutrition and infections from ill treated wounds.
In a desultory camp on the outskirts of the Washington Ruins I first heard the rumors.
“There’s a stronghold in New Georgia that’s prison to an angel,” Mordock said.
He spoke offhand, but glanced sideways at me from those knowing eyes.
I stirred the fire and feigned interest. What I wanted most was to just lay down and close my eyes, to sleep or die, it mattered not.
“There’s no such thing as angels,” Kin said. He was young and innocent himself, having learned nothing of the new world we lived in.
“So you say,” Mordock answered. His eyes were on me, and I felt the weight of his third eye, centered in his forehead. The mystic eye…
This is the entire passage, in its raw, unedited form. Not exactly high literature. Of course it changed as I developed it, but it was a beginning. It got me started. (Funny thing. Most, if not all, of the snippets I completed that rainy afternoon in a writing frenzy would make good story openings, if I decided to use them.)
“The Last Angel” is one of six stories in the collection Equinox – Six Declinations, published as an ebook by DragonLyre. Pick it up from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, and most other ebook retailers, and see how it compares to the idea it came from.
As you probably realize by now, ideas can spring from anywhere, at any time. They’re the stuff of our lives, born from our experiences, our relationships, our connections, our successes, failures, dreams and nightmares, agonies and ecstasies. They come from what makes us human.
Ideas – they’re a dime a dozen. It’s what you do with them that counts.
