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How do you come up with ideas for stories? How do you get started with a new story? How do you think of a good plot?

I don't have any tricks except that I will base stories and characters on things that happen to me in real life.

I also base many of my stories off of things that have happened to me. I take something in my life and expand and exagerate it until it can stand on it's own as it's own story with it's own background and meaning.

Brainstorming and free-thought scribbling...those things in school one thought they would never use. A lot of "what ifs" translate into stories as well...

I find i come up with most of my ideas while i'm talking to friends and family

Also I listen to music when I write.
I usually have to listen to the same artist or genre because the music affects my mood. For instance, my sweet romance story may become twisted horror as the song changes from country to rock!

Oh, the ways are endless. Sometimes it's from my own personal experience, my observations, movies, books, songs, anything is fair game. I think there are so many possibilities that are running wild out there - we see them every day forever but it's those people who can notice them and catch them before they disapear into the dust.

Sometimes I've started a novel from just a plot idea. Sometimes I get a random name of a character or a personality and a novel springs from that. Other times I just write a few beignning sentences right off the top of my head and see where it takes me. I've also just laid in bed at night thinking of good titles - from those titles I can work wonders (hopefully). Just a matter of feeling, sensing, and observing. Gail Carson Levine has some marvelous insight on this in Writing Magic. I high suggest it.

An idea pops into my head. It could be a phrase, a character or even a theme. It wont go away. It grows and grows to the point where I have to write it down for fear of forgetting it.

I have a bunch of stories on this website but I am not going to mention the titles because I don't want you to think that I am trying to entice you to read them, but I will mention the genre and what prompted or influenced me to write each of them. As you can see I have been trying to write in a variety of genre styles to challenge myself. First I choose the genre and then try to fashion a viable premise to go with it.

Horror Story - Inspired by my very real fear of this horror subject when I was a child.

Human Interest - My personal experience with someone suffering from dementia.

War Story (two stories) - Heavily influenced by tales told by my brother-in-law about his experiences in WWII.

Love Story - Wrote it just for the hell of it because I had never written one before, but influenced by someone I have known in the past (a woman) who always felt she wasn't pretty enough. (She was pretty enough.)

True - Inspired by couple of stories from personal, real-life experiences.

Philosophical - A story dealing with fate which was inspired by my interest in the "time travel" premise. This isn't a time travel story but it was my intention to give it the same eerie and paradoxical effect as one might experience with a time travel story.

Humorous / Morally Instructive - Initially inspired by this website's request for submissions for a story with the premise of "The self-destructive results of jealousy and hate".

Profound - Inspired by the challenge of conveying the concept of "doom" in a somewhat whimsical manner.

The one constant in all of my stories is the twist ending. I am a sucker for a twist ending and I always consider it half the challenge of the story I am writing to attempt to provide a good one.

I've been a writer all my adult life. And maybe some of you have heard of this joke, but I've used it numerous times over the years, a couple of times I was actually believed...

Someone asks "How do you get the ideas for your stories? It seems hard and you've always got ideas."

I glance around to ensure we're not being overheard, then say "I don't suppose I should be telling you this..." (which always precedes spilling the beans) "We writers have a special, private website that most of us use." (before the internet it was a special book sent to us privately)

"You see, if I want to write a new horror story or a new mystery, I just log in, give my secret password, and then I check a few boxes-- what type of story, what length -- short story or novel -- what setting -- modern day or old times. You know, I just click the boxes and it takes all my selections, and it downloads a story outline for me! All I need to do is put in some character names, tweak the story line a bit here and there, make any personal changes I want. But the entire story is already there, ready for me to edit. Sure saves a lot of time!"

heh heh, we writers are clever, eh?

Hello all!

I have a small notebook I almost always carry with me in which I write down ideas. It could be anything, from a sentence that just came to me and I believe it's beautiful to a few notes on a character description based on a person I saw. If I am somewhere that I cannot write I quickly type a few notes on my phone. I then sit on my laptop and I use some of those notes to start a new story - if it doesn't work I move on

My early experience as a reporter let me develop the practice of remembering things nearly verbatim. I use this to remember things which occur to me during times away from the computer. I keep an "ideas" file always ready on my laptop's "desktop" into which I type various thoughts, phrases, and concepts to research or think more about.

As to "how" I come up with stories, all kidding aside? I've got a very active mind, always have. Was reading at age 3, read thru all the kids' books which would interest a boy (Tarzan, etc) in the school library, was reading Hemingway, Faulkner, and others at age 11 or so.

In high school, which was excruciatingly boring to me (there were no advanced classes when I was a kid in the 50s) if we were assigned a novel for the semester lit class, I'd read it thru in 2-3 days and then sit through endless classroom discussions about chapters 1-4 when i'd already finished the book out of boredom. Add to this my science, as I whizzed through high school science and math. Have been tested in standard psych exams all my live and consistently have scored in the low 140s. And I'm a very fast reader with high comprehension percentages, too.

College, majored & graduated in chemistry, minors in bio and math, and I worked for years as a researcher for Gulf Oil Chemicals, but also took a 2nd major in English lit, focusing on James Joyce and particularly "Ulysses" (hence my sigline).

While in college, worked as a reporter for school paper until fired for insisting upon writing a politically incorrect story about administration inside politics, so I started my own underground newsletter, wrote & edited the whole thing. After college worked a while as a part-time reporter for a major daily. Continued to write short stories and essays, articles, etc, while engaged in my "day job" of chemistry researcher, then scientific computer programmer and analyst, later tech engineering consultant for "big oil". My techie and science skills have lapped over into my ease with computers -- I've got a knack for them and so I keep everything backed up on my trusty HP laptop and find it easy to maintain the hardware & software which enables me to write and keep notes.

Needless to say, my appetite for reading is voracious. I'll normally read 1-2 novels a week when I'm not busy working on my own private eye novels, and always am reading biographies, books on Imperial Rome, classical era Greece, military history (mostly the US Civil War & WW-2), plus books on cosmology, quantum physics, astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, you name it. And also when I'm not working on my own mystery novels, I review mystery novels for a website and will usually have a stack of 6-8 books on my table to read and write reviews for per month.

This constant reading energizes my brain and my mind is always buzzing with ideas and story concepts, different scientific areas to further read about, many "projects" ongoing. It's nonstop and the ideas are so many and frequent that I scarcely have time to jot them down.

So for me, it's not having enough ideas. It's having to sort thru all the stuff zooming around in my skull and jot some of them down in order for me to "clean house" mentally every few days.

Most of the time something in real life will inspire me to write. Or if I'm lucky, my dreams will spark some inspiration.

Honestly? I just think things up. Now there are occasional real life events which I may thread into the story line as "color" but the actual story? I really don't get inspired by anything outside. I just know that I want to write my newest 4th novel and start cooking up possible plots, and fiddle with these ideas until they make sense, and I write them down and then work out the details.

But there's never any outside influence which generates my principal plot ideas for my private detective novels. In fact I've got about a dozen story ideas already written down for future use.

Mostly the ideas just come to me. Not sure exactly how.