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Coming up with story ideas is a different process for everyone. There’s no one way to be creative. Depending on the genre writers can find inspiration anywhere or everywhere. I mainly write fantasy, so many of my ideas come while doing activities that involve imagination. Here are 7 ways I generate ideas for my writing.
1. Read
The more you read the more you learn. No matter what sort of reading it is. Read books with interesting themes, concepts you love, characters you love, relationships you love. All of it’s inspiration and all of it helps come up with story ideas. Maybe you’ll realise one of your characters shares similar motivations to a character in the book you’re reading. Maybe you’ll wish a scene had of gone another direction or a character had made another decision. What if a scene in your story could end up where the scene in the book didn’t? What if your characters made the decision you’d wanted to read?
2. Listen to music
Some like to write with music in the background, some don’t. I personally don’t listen to music while I’m writing, but do to come up with story ideas. Sometimes I’ll simply sit and listen to music while doing nothing else and invent scenarios in my head like musicals or movie trailers. If you’re lacking ideas for a certain scene but know the atmosphere/feeling you want to achieve in your writing, you can pick out music to help motivate you.
3. Play games
Whether you’re playing games or watching someone else play, you can study storylines similarly to reading a book. Hopefully they bring out ideas for your story.
4. Watch movies
Storytelling in movies can also be great inspiration for your writing. Anything creative that has you considering possibilities and alternatives helps generate story ideas. Guess plot twists. Take note of characters and their decisions. Analyse the atmosphere.
5. Browse images
Images can be great inspiration for settings in your story and may even help you create scenes which occur in those settings. Pinterest is a great resource for this. You may find landscapes for your characters to travel across, buildings for your civilisation to live in, costumes to bring our your characters’ personalities, or weapons for your characters to wield. Images can also be used as short writing prompts.
6. Meditate
I’ve found that if I’m really stuck for ideas, meditating helps. I meditate to clear my mind, which sounds impossible but the more you do it the closer you get to mental silence. I’m not the best at maintaining a meditation routine, but if I meditate for 15 minutes every day for a couple of days in a row I can clear my mind so I’m thinking of absolutely nothing. Then when I come out of meditation my thoughts make more sense and I find it easier to connect existing ideas and come up with new story ideas.
7. Write
If you’re not sure what to write about, just start writing. Get the ideas flowing and your brain working. Just start. Write whatever comes to mind, even if you start with, “I have no idea what to write to describe how I have ideas for stories and this sentence probably doesn’t make sense or have proper grammar but it’s starting to fill the page and get thoughts flowing and my brain is active so maybe an idea will come to me and then I’ll just type it into the sentence and keep going.”
An amazing first line can come later. Editing can come later. I will point out that I don’t do this for idea plotting, just when I’m starting to write scenes if I’m stuck, but it might work for ideas too. If you have an idea you can’t quite make sense of yet, write as much of it down as you can. Come back to it later. If you can still understand what you wrote then write out the scene. If it doesn’t make sense and you’ve forgotten what you meant, leave it in your list of potential ideas to come back to another time.
Let me know what genre you mainly write in and where you find inspiration! Or tell me if you find other sources that are helpful.