How do you come up with ideas for stories?
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- James Stilson
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Re: How do you come up with ideas for stories?
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"The key to writing... is writing." - William Forrester
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I think most people write from experience. It's just a matter of how well you can distort something to deliver it as an original piece of fiction.
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So, since writing it down has killed a lot of my obsession for the idea, it's freed up brain space for new thoughts, but I don't really have a sense of how to use that yet.
One thing I've started trying is using tarot cards to build "skeleton" of a character, and then seeing if they fit into any of the worlds I'm writing now (and if not, I'll start asking questions like, "would my protagonist like this character? What would they say to them?")
I think that might work out well for me, for character-driven pieces, and to populate crowds.
If you're not familiar with tarot, the basic idea (from the point of view of somebody who doesn't believe in it as a spiritual practice) is that each card is laden with an enormous amount of symbolism--a specific card in a specific place in the "spread" has 4 or 5 different layers of symbolism, before you start factoring in how they interact with each other. So, it's fundamentally a Rorschach test. There's something to go off of, but different people will find different patterns according to what makes sense to them.
So, recently what I've been doing is using 7 cards to represent, 1. The major life stage the character is in. 2. Their long term past. 3. Recent events. 4. Current mindset. 5. Major influence. 6. Goals and 7. Needs.
Sometimes I come up with something incoherent, but the element of randomness breaks me out of my old habits and gives me something better to build on than a blank sheet of paper.
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