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This episode discusses where to get ideas for stories.
The personal podcast for Ian MacTire, writer / podcaster / werewolf. This podcast follows my journey from first draft to published novel and beyond.
If you're a return listener, welcome back, if this is your first time, welcome! I hope you find the information in these episodes to be useful. Also, if you are enjoying these, please leave a review and share with others.
This is Episode 5, Where to Get an Idea
In our previous episode, we mentioned that one of the things you need to write is an idea. This episode is going to talk about where to get your ideas from.
Before we get into that, I just want to say that there are no original ideas, only variations on a theme. For example, one of the books I'm writing is about werewolves. Werewolves in and of themselves are not an original idea. In fact, the earliest surviving example of man-to-wolf transformation can be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back to 2,100 BC, although the werewolf as we have come to know such a thing first appeared in ancient Greece and Rome, in poetic, ethnographic, and philosophical texts. So using this example, humans have been telling stories about werewolves for centuries. The same can be said of things like vampires and other assorted monsters.
Looking away from the horror genre specifically, many of our most enduring myths and stories are really just the hero's journey, with a different cast of characters each time. I say this in case you are currently like I once was. There was a time I didn't write anything because I was looking for an "original idea". I had come up with plenty of ideas for stories, but because none of them were "original", I tended to discard them. I'm not sure what made me realize that I wasn't going to write anything original, and that I should just write, but I want to share this with you in case this is what is stopping you.
OK, that out of the way, let's talk about where to get ideas. Aside from the "mythical" and getting inspired by "the muses", there actually is some tangible places. There are books that you can buy in bookstores and online that have writing prompts in them. These usually have some kind of short sentence or paragraph telling you what to write about and then the pages are blank so you can write. Some of these are just general suggestions, some of these are set up to give you a daily prompt. There are also writer forums, such as NaNoWriMo, and even subreddits on Reddit that were created with the idea of inspiring people to write.
These are not the only places that you can go to for inspiration. One of the things you can do is to adapt a story from real life. Read a news article and then write a story about someone featured in it. You don't necessarily have to know what that person is like, or what they enjoy or what their pet peeves are. Just imagine that you are them, and then write a story from their point of view. You can also choose to write about the event instead. For example, if you read an article about a sink hole opening up in the middle of a city, think to yourself about why that might have happened. The more mundane explanation is likely that it happened because the city's infrastructure budget isn't sufficient to keep up with repairs and thus the street collapsed in on itself, but what if it's actually a portal to another dimension and it allows giant kaiju to come here and begin destroying the city? Or maybe an ancient evil was buried there and it has been awakened?
Another way is to think about folklore and fairytales. Many stories have been written that take a well known and beloved fairy tale and gave it a little twist. We all know the story about Little Red Riding Hood. The movie Red Riding Hood took that story, gave it a bit of a twist and voila, a movie about a woman who loves one man, but is intended to be married to another, and plans to elope with the one she loves with the help of her sister, only to have her sister killed by a werewolf that quite possibly could be the one she plans to elope with, and dealing with the consequences of that death.
You can always look for inspiration in the people that you know. Kevin Smith based the character of Jay of the duo of Jay and Silent Bob on Jason Mewes. The Coen brothers wrote a story based on a stoner friend of theirs, that in the story becomes a detective. This is what led to the movie "The Big Lebowski". Think about the people you know. Do any of them standout as the possible basis for a story? As well, you can always go to someplace public, like the mall or a park, and just people watch. Watch what people are doing and see if you can imagine a story based on the people you see. Maybe you see a little girl blowing bubbles. The more mundane explanation is that she's clearly blowing bubbles. But what if it was more than that? What if those bubbles weren't traditional bubbles, but a form of magic that allows her to help fairies get back home, but adults see them only as regular bubbles, because they've lost connection to the magic that would allow them to see and interact with the fae folk?
Another way is to take some event that happened in your life, be it big or small, and use that as the basis of a story. I once went diving with great white sharks off of the coast of Isla de Guadalupe. There was some cool things that happened there, including a shark coming into the cage I was in (albeit not intentionally, but that's a story for different day). Maybe that launches into a story about a man who is spear fishing off the coast, and his cage gets attacked by a shark, and the cable connecting the cage to the boat snaps, sending him down to the ocean floor. Now he has to fight against time and sharks to get back to the boat before his air runs out. Admittedly, this is probably the plot of a hundred different movies since Jaws was released in 1975. My point still stands though. I took an event that happened in my life, and spun an idea for a story out of it.
And finally, one last suggestion for getting an idea is simply to sit down and start writing a short story. You don't have to have an idea in mind, just write what comes to your mind. Though I have been blessed with an overabundance of story ideas in the last few years(I believe at last count I had 107 or 108 ideas), I wasn't always so lucky. Some of my ideas though did come from doing just this method. I didn't keep the free form story I was writing because what I had written would need a lot of work to be useful for the idea it generated, so to me it was just easier to jot the basic idea down and work from scratch, but nothing says you have to scrap it.
There are many other ways to get ideas that I haven't discussed in this episode, but in trying to keep this from being too long, I'm going to stop it here. I hope you found this helpful, and a good starting point for generating ideas if you happen to find yourself stuck, and who knows, you may find yourself jotting down a hundred plus ideas. If you have an idea for generating ideas that I didn't talk about, please feel free to reach out to me on my Twitter account, or Instagram account, and let me know. If I missed enough of them, as always, I'll make a second episode to cover what I missed. Stay classy, and keep writing those stories!
This has been another episode of Empty Pages. If you enjoyed what you heard and want more of it, you can follow me at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Please leave me a review, as that really helps me out, and if you do, you might find your review featured in a future episode. You can find me at ianmactire.com, as well as on Twitter and Instagram as @ianmactire. Until next time, I'm Ian, and this is Empty Pages. Stay classy and write those stories!
This has been another episode of Empty Pages. If you enjoyed what you heard and want more of it, you can follow me at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Please leave me a review, as that really helps me out, and if you do, you might find your review featured in a future episode. You can find me at ianmactire.com, as well as on Twitter and Instagram as @ianmactire. Until next time, I'm Ian, and this is Empty Pages. Stay classy and write those stories!