Where Do We Get Ideas?

 Are you sitting there looking at a blank page? Yes, I mean You, who are reading this.

 If the answer is Yes, then stop right now, staring at a blank page will not help, if you don’t have a story idea.

We expend to much anxiety over finding a great story idea.

Karen Gribbin https://www.instagram.com/studiocone10/

"I have nothing to write about.”

 “I got nothing exciting to say.”

“I don’t know what to do to develop an idea.”

 I’ll let you into a secret, there is infinite material for stories, it needs not be new or different, and can be developed in any manner of ways.

Experienced writers find ideas from just about everything around them, and so can you.

We pull ideas from dreams, conversations, observations, images, newspaper items. Café watching doesn’t only give you characters, story ideas can come from there as well. Music themes, walks in the country, sentences from other books.

You could even mine taste sensations, a lost memory, a train trip in winter, journaling, or 500-word exercises.

Many of my own ideas come from smaller writing exercises or newspaper headlines, or a combination of two or more situations, that come together at right moment.

Karen Gribbin
 https://www.instagram.com/studiocone10/

Writer’s ideas often sit dormant for years until, that right moment comes along.

Always write down your ideas, when you think them, you may never use them, but they’ve arrived, believe me when I say ‘they won’t come again.’ Write, write, write.

New writers are often told to ‘write what they know,’ which is fine up to a point. Certainly, write about your own experiences and familiar subjects, yet understand they may not be interesting to your reader.

You ‘ll certainly need to use your imagination to develop drama, actions, and conflict into your stories.

Another mistake new writers make when drawing on experiences is they report what really happened. No one wants to hear what really happened, your readers want to see what happened.

Show not tell. Your readers are intelligent people, they can tell their own stories.

For me a story/novel needs to take me out of myself to another world, another life, another year.

What I want in a novel is the escape, the tears, the empathy with characters. All these emotions are more important than the telling.

Below is a list of idea sources.

·         Newspaper headlines/items

·        Conversations

·         Walks in the country

Karen Gribbin https://www.instagram.com/studiocone10/

·         People’s mannerisms

·         Anecdotes

·         Images

·         Paintings

·         Music

Try any of these ideas and see what you can do with them. Set yourself a task to first write 500 words, you’ll know by then if you want to expand the idea into something bigger.