Ideas aren’t hard. In fact, I’d say ideas are actually easy. There. I said it. But before you tell me I’m wrong, crazy, or don’t know what I’m talking about, give me a chance to explain.
The Hard Part
I feel like when people say they can’t come up with any ideas, that’s not really what they mean. Allow me to demonstrate. A purple moose invades a gas station. A sailboat sails into a bay filled with old pennies. A brother and sister discover they are half porcupine.
I didn’t think those out before writing them. Those were literally the first three things that popped into my head, and I wrote them down. Boom. Three ideas, just like that. I never claimed they were good ideas, but they’re ideas, and they were easy to come up with.
Ideas are easy. Turning an idea into a story is the hard part. Ideas are just the seed. They’re the spark. They’re a dime a dozen. Having an idea that is already fleshed out into the story you want to tell rarely happens, if ever.
The idea is only the beginning. It’s a note you jot down in your notebook. It’s a thought you have while driving. It’s a few lines of text you type into your phone. It doesn’t have a life of its own yet. It’s up to you to bring it to life, and that is the hard part.
Keep a Notebook
You need to write down your ideas, even the bad ones. You never know when something about a bad idea will trigger a good one. Keep a writing notebook with you at all times. It doesn’t have to be nice or fancy. You just need a little notebook to write down your ideas because, once you realize that ideas are everywhere and coming at you all the time, you’ll need a place to record them.
Going through your idea notebook can be very productive too. You may come across an idea you wrote down in the past and barely gave a second thought to, only to suddenly realize there’s something there you can work with.
Use Writing Prompts
Writing prompts are a great way to generate ideas. In fact, you can get multiple ideas from a single prompt. The trick is not to think of the prompt as the idea. The prompt is only there to get you thinking down a certain path.
Let’s say you read a writing prompt that says, “A young boy finds a black hole in his backpack.” Now you begin thinking, “Why is there a black hole in his backpack? Did someone put it there? What if aliens put it there to act as a gate for an invasion? Wait, it’s a backpack. Okay. How about this? It’s not in a backpack. It’s in the school cafeteria. What if these black holes started popping up in school cafeterias all over the world? But not every school. Maybe only certain schools. Maybe schools with certain science equipment in them? Maybe it was a science professor who accidentally opened a portal at his school, and aliens are coming through?”
See what happened? The prompt was about a boy with a black hole in his backpack. The idea that came out of that prompt was about a science teacher who accidentally opened a portal that allowed an alien invasion. The prompt puts your mind on the right track. You do the rest.
Ask “What If?”
“What if?” is one of the greatest questions a writer can ask themself. It’s similar to thinking through a writing prompt because it puts your mind on the right track. What if someone found a way to bring dinosaurs back? What would they do with them? What if they created a zoo or park for them to inhabit? Oh, and what if they got out?
That’s Jurassic Park.
Asking “what if?” becomes even more powerful the more you ask it. “What if this happened? Okay, then what? What if that didn’t go well? Who would be affected? What would they try to do about it? What if that caused another problem?” Keep asking questions and see where the answers take you.
By asking “what if?”, you are cultivating the idea seed. You are nurturing it and helping it grow into a plot. And this can be one of the most fun parts of writing. You get to play with the idea, try different possibilities, and see what it might become. Remember, ideas are the seeds and the easy part. Cultivating those ideas is where the creative work happens.
Start With a Seed
One of the things I hear the most from people who say they want to write a book but haven’t is that they can’t come up with any good ideas. But maybe the problem isn’t coming up with ideas. Maybe it’s expecting those ideas to arrive as fully formed stories.
Don’t wait for that to happen. Write down the strange thought that pops into your head. Try a writing prompt. Ask “what if?” and keep asking questions. Take those little idea seeds and play with them. Some won’t grow into anything. Others may surprise you. You won’t know until you start cultivating them.
Ideas are everywhere. The fun part is discovering what they can become.
