How do you come up with ideas for stories?
If you have spelling or grammar questions, please post them in the International Grammar section.
If you want feedback for poetry or short stories you have written, please post the poem or short story in either the Creative Original Works: Short Stories section or the Creative Original Works: Poetry section.
If you have a book that you want reviewed, click here to submit your book for review.
-
- Posts: 38
- Joined: 30 Oct 2007, 17:35
- Bookshelf Size: 0
How do you come up with ideas for stories?
-
- Posts: 6
- Joined: 03 Jan 2008, 21:18
- Bookshelf Size: 0
- Syrcco44
- Posts: 102
- Joined: 03 Feb 2008, 15:00
- Currently Reading: Scorpio Races By Stiefvater
- Bookshelf Size: 0
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.
- j p gilbert
- Posts: 72
- Joined: 01 Nov 2015, 17:36
- Bookshelf Size: 21
- Reviewer Page: onlinebookclub.org/reviews/by-j-p-gilbert.html
- Latest Review: "An ABC of Prostate Cancer in 2015" by Alan G Lawrenson
- DATo
- Previous Member of the Month
- Posts: 5813
- Joined: 31 Dec 2011, 07:54
- Bookshelf Size: 0
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.
― Steven Wright
- moderntimes
- Posts: 2249
- Joined: 15 Mar 2014, 13:03
- Favorite Book: Ulysses by James Joyce
- Currently Reading: Grendel by John Gardner
- Bookshelf Size: 0
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?
- stephsavva
- Posts: 5
- Joined: 28 Nov 2015, 16:34
- Bookshelf Size: 0
- Reviewer Page: onlinebookclub.org/reviews/by-stephsavva.html
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
- moderntimes
- Posts: 2249
- Joined: 15 Mar 2014, 13:03
- Favorite Book: Ulysses by James Joyce
- Currently Reading: Grendel by John Gardner
- Bookshelf Size: 0
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.
-
- Posts: 22
- Joined: 06 Nov 2015, 17:58
- Currently Reading: The 5th Wave
- Bookshelf Size: 519
- Reviewer Page: onlinebookclub.org/reviews/by-aj-bruns.html
- moderntimes
- Posts: 2249
- Joined: 15 Mar 2014, 13:03
- Favorite Book: Ulysses by James Joyce
- Currently Reading: Grendel by John Gardner
- Bookshelf Size: 0
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.
- samanthas
- Posts: 1
- Joined: 01 Dec 2015, 11:57
- Bookshelf Size: 1