Ever wonder where to find ideas for stories? Here are fifteen places I find ideas for stories.
1. On a run.
“What would happen if I crawled through that drainage culvert?”
2. Reading other books.
“What if I combined Polar Express with The Martian?”
3. Cooking.
“What if there was a story about spices?”
4. Showering.
“Why doesn’t Santa have a pet?”
5. Listening to kids talk.
“Do teeth ever lose their kids?”
6. Listening to adults talk.
“I wish I could just rent a kid, for holidays and stuff.”
7. Listening to music.
“But with the beast inside/There’s nowhere we can hide.”
8. Gardening.
“How do worms keep our garden safe, Mom?”
9. At the museum.
“What if the dinosaurs had dance parties at night when the museum was closed?”
10. At the grocery store.
“Do seeds ever try to grow into a different kind of plant?”
11. At the park.
“Are there zombie bees?”
12. At a sporting event.
“Can kids do triathlons, too?”
13. Lying in bed, trying to sleep.
“Where did my grandfather get that old pocket watch?”
14. As soon as you wake up and remember your dream.
“All I remember is the church became a riverboat, and then the Devil walked in.”
15. Driving somewhere.
“Johnny sped out of town, the white lines on the highway blurred into a streak. He couldn’t understand how, but suddenly he remembered every moment of his life from birth until now. Including the face of the woman leaning over him, injecting him with something. Who was she? And what had she done to him?”
Our brains are made for stories. Our brains LOVE stories. More areas of our brain are activated when we hear stories, our memory works better, and our emotions kick in. If you want to sell more products or if you are a parent and want your kids to listen!!!) Tell them a story.
Some people are born storytellers and know just how to hold the audience under their spell. Other people need little bit of work and practice to tell a good story. This is true for kids and adults.
Remember the old game where one person says a sentence and the others in the group continue it? A classic. I love doing that one with my kids and setting up interesting problems for the characters to solve. That’s a great way to spark some creativity. But if you want a little coaching or helping getting ideas, try playing with Storycubes. We love these in our family. They event worked great at my workshops for the Summer Food Program.
I offer storytelling tips in my workshop “Want to Be a Writer.” I share my journal and my creative process. Running is of course a big part of my idea machine. But there are other ways I come up with story ideas. I share them all with the kids and I encourage them to experiment with some of my favorite techniques for thinking of and telling good stories.
Six Storytelling Tips
Doodle. I love to doodle and this often inspires a fun story starter. Doodle off of paper, too. Think outside the box. Maybe the act of doodling makes it into your story.
Lists. I generate lists of words and events that might happen to a made character. This helps with word variety, too.
Listen. Jot down what people around you are saying. Combine the sentences of two different conversations. WHOA, did that just lead you to an amazing new story?
Ask questions. I let my kids ask as many questions as they want. That includes my own children in my family and the kids in my workshops.
Senses! Make sure your story includes things people see, feel, hear, smell, and taste. Get that brain activated!
Humor. My favorite six sense is the sense of humor. Even a scary ghost story is better with a little joke here and there.
These tips aren’t about the mechanics of writing. These are about the magic of storytelling. And that’s the really fun part, in my opinion.
Looking for more info on how the brain lives for stories?
What are you favorite storytelling tips? Share them here!
If you want to be a writer, you need to write and you need to write a lot. In fact, there’s a lot of advice out there that suggests writers should write a story a month.
I’ve been writing regularly for many years. I have a tidy stack of rejections that serve as a time capsule of my development as a writer. I juggle several projects at one time, but aside from that, I do try to write a story a month to keep producing new work and letting those creative juices flow. So far this year I’ve revised several stories that I started in late 2015, but I have at least four brand new stories I created in 2016:
Schadenfreude (essay)
The Hunter Case (adult short story)
Weirdest Creature in the World (picture book)
Digit (picture book)
Good Friend, Bad Choices (essay)
That’s five new stories or essays in four months. This doesn’t count the pitches, blog posts, or articles I have sent in to magazines and doesn’t count the progress I made on my new middle grade novel.
You don’t need to write each story perfectly and you don’t need to try to publish all of the stories you write. But you need to write a story a month. The big question many people face is how to write a story a month.
Keep your writing tools handy
If you want to write a story a month, you can’t run around searching for paper and pen every time an idea strikes you. You also can’t rely on your memory. I carry a notebook and pen with me wherever I go. That way whenever creativity strikes I can jot down my ideas. But I also have a smartphone and a mini-keyboard in case a get a story idea and I’m in a spot where I can type out more details. Smartphones are also useful for recording ideas when you’re sitting in a dark bedroom waiting for your child to sleep.
It’s like an idea net
Go on autopilot
It’s not always easy to come up with ideas when you want to write a story, but sometimes inspiration does strike. It just doesn’t strike when you want it to. So you have to let yourself be open at times when you’re busy. Driving, showering, cooking – those are all times when we’re on autopilot and often ideas will float into our brains.
Force It
It’s ok to force yourself to be creative, too, by generating lists of things you like and don’t like. Just write down all your thoughts. One of them could lead to an idea that becomes your story of the month. One of my favorite tips from a writing conference was to think of twenty possible outcomes or solutions to a problem. After you write all of those down, even the dumb ones, you start on twenty-one and that’s when things get exciting.
Move
Blood flow helps the brain and you need your brain to write a story. So go for a walk. Go for a run. Ride the stationery bike. Move. Aerobic exercise tends to lead to more creativity, but strength training is good for balance.
Ideas come on the go
Listen
You don’t have to come up with all of the ideas for your stories on your own. Listen to other people! Yes, we all hate it when people tell us “you should write a story about…” but sometimes, every once in awhile those ideas aren’t that bad. My first fiction story ever sold to Highlights came from me listening to my eight year old.
Doodling also inspires ideas
Get accountable
Joining critique groups are a great way to motivate you to write a story a month just so you have something to bring and share. SCBWI has info on critique groups for children’s writing and Pennwriters has groups for all kinds of writing.
If you want to go virtual, write your story and share it on Scribophile.
There are also monthly activities out there to help you reach your goal o writing a story a month. There’s PiBoIdMo or “Picture Book Idea Month” that encourages participants to come up with one idea for a picture book a day for a month. Out of those 30 ideas you’re bound to find 12 that could become stories in the next year. And you could then join in with Julie Hedlund’s 12×12 or start your own Facebook accountability group.
There’s some debate if Facebook helps anyone at all.
A good friend of mine who is also a great writer recently turned off her Facebook in order to complete a major project. It was a good decision for her because she knows that like many of us, social media can be distracting. It is so easy to sit on Facebook (or other social media) and scroll through my feed laughing at funny posts, rolling my eyes at overly dramatic posts, burning with rage at posts about injustice, and trying not to cry at moving, uplifting posts. And for some people, Facebook is more than distracting, it’s detracting. It makes them feel downright bad.
It is a lot easier to scroll than tackle tough writing tasks. So why don’t I eliminate Facebook from my life all together?
Because like any good optimist, I think there is some good in everything. Even Facebook.
I spent a great day yesterday working with a creative friend yesterday who wondered if Facebook really was useful for her. Also this month, one of my favorite clients has reached out to me to ask for two presentations on social media, one for beginners and one for advanced users. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how social media like Facebook can be useful.
Story Source
People share stories on Facebook, and writers need stories. Facebook helps with inspiration! No, I don’t suggest you steal people’s life stories for your next novel, but I do suggest thinking about motivations and background and choices. Use what you read about how people to act to make your characters seem as real as possible.
Network It
Hello, critique group! Yes, you can connect with other writers and conduct a pretty decent critique group via Facebook. And if you get into a great professional writers’ group you can also learn valuable info on how to pitch your work. Just make sure you give as much as you get. Remember, online networking can be a lot more effective if you also incorporate some IRL (in real life) experiences.
What You Don’t Know
Facebook helps you gain knowledge, if you use it right. Go beyond just liking friends and find some pages that feature information on different cultures, or foods, or skills. Like them. Learn form them!! Maybe push yourself to go to new events that you discover online and learn about yourself, too.
Hone Your Funny Bone
As a writer, use Facebook and other social media to write as funny as you can as succinctly as you can. Humor works well on social media and helps you practice your craft. As a reader, find some joy in the world. Think about what it is that people love to read about and include these elements in your stories.
Keep It Real
Sometimes all we need to do is post our goals in public to help us reach them. Once you have a good core group of friends, you can ask them to help you stay accountable. Just don’t forget to lend the same support to other writers who also need that nudge.
Facebook for the Checkbook
Facebook helps writers get writing work – sometimes. It works for some people, but it’s not the best way to land great gigs and it should never be your only way.
There are lots of ways to use social media for your benefit. But I think a big part of using social media the right way is to think about your goals and identify drawbacks. I have turned off notifications and only go on social media during designated times during the day when I don’t have other obligations. I also monitor my usage on RescueTime so I can find out if I’m cheating!!
I’m in a really cool work group of fellow writers and illustrators that is working to support each other and promote each other for school visits. Exciting!
2. I was super excited to discover that my local library has an entire shelf full of the Newbery Award winners! The only challenge is that these specific books can’t be checked out.
I’m also working on getting a poster that I saw in the library. Super exciting because I feel like I just discovered a tool to help me reach my goal!
3. I also discovered another thing about myself as a writer. I’m in a writing community right now that’s very focused on pitching freelance articles to online outlets and I have found myself increasing my pitching frequency! But I realize that I’m doing that because I’m responding to the vibe of that group. No one is peer pressuring me, I’m peer pressuring myself. But I think it’s good to be working on a variety of writing types and to recognize this aspect of my personality.
4. I set my writing goals (finally) for this year. One of them is to write a really good personal essay and get it published. I have several topics in mind. Stay tuned!
A bumble bee, cousin to my characters, hard at work
Protagonist v. Main Character
I’m struggling with characters in my story and their jobs. I think I have one main character and one protagonist. But I was thrilled to find this post from elements of cinema that provides great examples of stories where the main character isn’t always the protagonist, or the protagonist isn’t clear until deep into the story, or even complex stories with an ensemble cast each going through their own struggle.
I’m working on my bee story and I want my protagonist, the one who chooses, to be my queen been.
So with that distinction clarified, I have decided I want my main character to be a worker bee, one who has the job of Forager. She can do tasks that set my protagonist up for the choice that is essential to the story. My main character will also have a choice or two.
Ensemble Cast
I love the idea of an ensemble cast. I’m not looking to create anything as epic as Game of Thrones, but I think I could possibly produce something approaching the Breakfast Club, where the different honeybees come together to save their Hive, which is sort of a character on its own.
Now I have a problem when it comes to antagonist. I had several problems facing my sweet sister honeybees:
Winter
Food source disappearing
A strange new kind of bee that is out to destroying them
But I didn’t actually develop a character as antagonist. I have nameless foes. I have internal conflict and external conflict, but no villain. I’m thinking I need one.
Part of me is thinking a drone might make a good villain. A drone would want the natural order of the hive disrupted. A drone is born only to mate with the queen and then lives off the food produced by the workers and then kicked out to die as winter arrives. A drone who likes the sweet life might not want to be kicked out to die as winter arrives. He might look for a queen who is willing to change the way she lives so that he can live his lazy, luxurious life a little longer. He might feed her desire to make her own decisions. I think he could be a good tempter who tries to entice her to give in to her selfishness…which would lead to the end of the Hive. Ok, I think I have my villain.
I’ve been keeping track of my writing submissions, rejections, and acceptances in a fancy little notebook for the past three years.
Fancy notebook
In a private Facebook group, I recently participated in a discussion about how much money other full-time freelancers make annually. Many of them are doing full-time journalism and copywriting and not trying to make it as fiction writers. While I keep track of my financials, I was inspired by this discussion to analyze the volume and success rate of my pitching.
So I launched into the analysis of my submissions, rejections, and acceptances. Now, even though someone I love very, very much is like and expert on Numbers, charts, and graphs, I’m not so much of an expert. So I started out very simply with a numeric chart. Later I might try pie charts and bar graphs. Also, later I might analyze my non-fiction versus fiction rates. But at this point, here are my basic numbers.
One of the hardest tasks I had in making these charts was choosing a color for each year. I don’t exactly have an eye for design, so I decided to use the Pantone colors of the year!
2013 Submissions
2014 Submissions
2015 Submissions
2016 Submissions – will this be the year I submit over the summer?
So it looks like 2015 was a good year in terms of overall volume. I did better on my amount of submissions and, probably logically, did better in terms of acceptances. There’s also a definite bell curve in terms of what time of year I am most productive with submissions.
For 2016, I hope to maintain a steady rate of submissions even over the summer. I’d also love to hit at least 10% of acceptances for the year.
Do you keep track of your submissions, rejections, and acceptances? Have you ever analyzed your success rate?
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