How do you come up with ideas for stories?
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Re: How do you come up with ideas for stories?
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I've also decided to take some of the things I've lived through and write them into short experiences, placing them into a collection for others to read. Living through depression, anxiety, PTSD, abuse, etc. Using specific triggers I have and writing them all out with tooth and nail. For one: because it's like therapy for me. For two: what if it helps someone going through a similar time in their life? It could be an emotion I'm working through, a pin pointed vivid memory I no longer want in my head, or something I saw happening from a far that needs to be down on paper. Granted no names, places, or sensitive information would ever be written down. It's all about flowing through those things and "getting over" them.
- moderntimes
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There are things which I enjoy, and I put them into my novels as background themes. Since I'm an opera fan, I'll have my private eye and his detective pal double-dating to see Houston Grand Opera perform Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (I'll be going to the performance in January and as a singer, I've actually performed in the opera.)
Likewise, I'm an avid pool player and have won a good number of tourneys. My private eye is also a top pool player.
And so on. Of course, these are used as background material to make my character be more well rounded and realistic. For the primary story, I think up a central theme, then work that theme into the major plots.
For example, in my 2nd novel, Blood Storm, my central theme was "family values" -- dysfunctional families. So I used three totally different families in the story. I had one totally berserk serial killer and his brother. I had a crime lord who had once loved a woman and they had a lovely daughter together, who is now forlorn and troubled. And a wealthy finance investor whose wife, a younger "trophy wife" is fearful. So I intermixed these 3 "families" and the opening epigram of the book is "A little more than kin and less than kind." which I call "Hamlet's take on family values"
So I take threads of ideas and develop novel-length themes from them. My new novel in progress is based on "betrayal" and so we will have several acts of betrayal in the novel. Some of the betrayals will be criminal and drug-related. Some will be deeply personal. And therefore I have a driving and motive theme which engenders all the ideas which make up the whole novel.
- sablefalls
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- Cee-Jay Aurinko
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I can relate sable. One other thing I found that works is to write a single line of dialog. Anything really. And then I write another. And another. And if I have a whole page filled with nothing but dialog, chances are pretty good that I will see a story in there somewhere.
- moderntimes
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For me, the ideas for a story aren't hard to think of. I just turn my mind to any sort of criminal activity and there are plenty of things to write about -- theft, drugs, jealousy, rivalry, money grubbing, all the failings of humanity. In fact, I've got maybe a dozen or more ideas in my "future" file for the next private eye novel.
But my task isn't the original idea for a story. The hard work for me is developing the clues and plot tweaks which drive the story line. Also, the various characters and their human traits, behavior, and personalities. That's the tough job for me.
- Emmanuel
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Some people get ideas from what is happening to them or people around them.
Some get the ideas from stories they have read or heard about.And many other ways.
For me, the first is the most applied.
- moderntimes
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There are however a few incidents which I stretch into a story concept. A couple years back when I was in the hospital, this female physician, British, came to see me and she had this habit of twirling her stethoscope around her finger, back and forth. So I took this one little thing and the British doctor became a New Zealand trauma surgeon, and she's a central character in my 3rd novel
- Loverockers
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- moderntimes
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For one of my crime novels, I decided the central core theme would be "obsession" (the romantic kind). So I interwove two separate stories in which that sort of fixation can result in tragedy.
- njzeba
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- Renee Bella
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- cursillo86
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Then I need characters who will promote the message, characters who will oppose them, and characters who will be transformed by the events that happen to them. For weeks as I think about the novel before I begin writing it, I let these characters live inside me. I listen to them. Yes, I hear voices.
Plotting is fun for me. I am older (67), and my life has been rich with experiences that have deepened the feelings of my heart. So I can draw on those experiences. But I update them in terms of current events and changes in technology. I research. Little by little, snippets of action and story begin to come to me. I wait until I have the main hook. After all these things, I am ready to write. All of this is a process that takes me usually a few months.
Once I begin to write, I dedicate at least three hours every day to it. I seldom write more than four or five hours. I need to live a life also. I start by writing down what I think the plot will be and who the characters will be. Then I write questions to myself about the plot and characters, and then I answer those questions. This doesn't take me long. It primes me to begin the first chapter. With each chapter, I usually write out some questions and answers before I begin. I write: This happens, but what if this happens instead?
Always I know what the ending will be. Then from the beginning, I like to put in a torturous path of twists and turns to arrive at the ending. This I do to keep the reader guessing and to make the reading fun. Often things happen that I never originally envisioned.
Story ideas come from true events of my life or from the headlines of stories in other countries. I visit most of the places I write about if I haven't been there. I am a fanatic that details be authentic. Once, I returned to the streets of a city where I had lived in Mexico in order to enact a kidnapping scene that had to take place within a few minutes. A principal character escaped from a police car and had to run from point A to B in the downtown section of this city to make it in time for a rendezvous with another character coming from a different location. I ran the mile and a half through the city streets and a park to see if it were feasible during a busy time of day! Once I had to research whether it would be dark at 7 pm in a place in northern Mexico during late October. It had to be dark. How long did twilight last?
So, as for story ideas, I guess I sum it up like this: I know what I want to say; I consider who I want to say it; then I figure out how to put those together in a plot derived from life experience or headlines. All my life I have been a story teller. I am not a literary writer in the sense that most people think of that. But if I can have fun and the readers also, and if the message goes out clearly, then I think I have had some great success!
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