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As authors, we are living in a time where fresh ideas are hard to come by. Oftentimes I think I’ve found my next great idea, and then ten minutes later I see someone else has already used it. It’s hard! However, there are tons of easy things you can do to spark imagination and come up with ideas that haven’t been used before. We’d like to help you come up with some fresh ideas so you can stop aimlessly staring at your computer and get to work on your next project. There are five simple ways you can come up with good story ideas without having to turn to the same overused tropes and plot lines. In this post, we aim to arm you with two strategies for creating new characters, two strategies for creating plot, and a strategy for setting.
Change Up Your Environment
It’s not easy to come up with ideas when you’ve been staring at your computer for the last thirty minutes and have completely hit a dead end. Get up and get out of the house for a few minutes, don’t try to come up with ideas based on what people have already done by staring at your bookshelf. Writer's block is very hard to break by sitting in the same environment with the same things assaulting your senses. Choose a public place with people and things to observe and sit for a while. To give you a list of some places to go:
- Local coffee shop
- Library
- Park
- Beach or Pool
Go somewhere to give your mind a break, and just look around, notice the people around you, the setting you’re in, and everything you can sense. What does the room smell like? What can you hear? What do you see? Bring a notepad and see if you can start to jot down ideas, even random notes about where you are. Look at the people passing and see if you can make up your own stories for them. Why is one person rushing? Why does another look sad? In a simple exercise you’ll be creating your own world of characters to insert into your story.
Lentil Storyland Settings
This one is a bit odd, but it’s a shockingly easy way to begin world building and start a story. Setting is one of the key elements of a good story, and having a great setting in mind can help to spark ideas about plot and characters.
Buy a small bag of lentils and grab a piece of printer paper and a pen. Take a handful of the lentils and place them on your printer paper. Let the lentils land where they want to on the paper and don’t move them, then grab a pen and outline the lentils. Generally, you’ll end up with a big group of lentils on the center of the page and a bunch of little lentil "islands" spread out around the rest of the page. This should help you to make a mainland and several islands, the perfect impromptu map with its own individual shape. From there, you can break up your mainland into countries or cities, whatever you’d like to include in your land. Add mountains or buildings, make up stories about the inter-relations of the places you invent. Adding little details to your map can help the setting become much more real to you. It can be a kingdom or just a backyard, it can be where your whole story takes place, or just one scene. This is a very easy way to break your writer’s block and get some new ideas flowing without having too strict of a constraint on your creative freedom.
Reimagined Characters
Pablo Picasso is widely quoted for his saying, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” While thievery of plot ideas is widely not recommended, there is a great way to take a character that you like and transform them into a different character of your own invention. This idea is really simple and fun and requires no materials other than your brain and your computer. Pick two or three characters from other books or movies that you really enjoy and think about combining their personalities into one character to create a new one. Think about how this new character would act and talk. How would a character with this personality type look to you? Once you have a personality and body in mind, think about how they would dress and interact with other characters.
To illustrate, take Sherlock Holmes, from The Canon of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s collection, and The Mad Hatter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, to create a psychotic detective who has trouble solving crime scenes because he can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. He appears in my head as a short, blading man in a top hat and a maroon waistcoat. As a detective he's very smart, but wherever he's assigned to a case, there's always so much ensuing chaos that the police dread dealing with him, but he always somehow manages to solve the case.
There are millions of character combinations and possibilities available that you could use to make the perfect new addition to your story.
Writing Prompts for Plot
The most common thing we all hear when we talk about running out of ideas is writing prompts, but there is truly a right way to use them. Having a rambling rough draft made from a simple startup prompt can be edited into something that you’re proud of.
Start with an easy prompt from the internet. There are tons of sites available that are dedicated to different types of writing prompts. The New York Times lists plenty of prompts that should be able to spark your interest. Both worded prompts and picture prompts are available and are great resources to help you get going. From there, try to write the prompt just as a rough draft, just storyboarding, coming up with ideas and getting them down on paper in a concise manner. If you’re using a picture prompt, even getting some observations about the image down on paper can be a start.
Writers often put a lot of pressure on themselves to put a fully thought-out and grammatically perfect story down on paper the first time around. That’s not the goal here. Just get down some snippets of ideas, it doesn’t even have to be in a plot format. Something like watching a random two minutes in the middle of a movie. You just need an idea; the rest of the story can come later.
Detective Storyboard Plots
If you’re a fan of craftier ideas for coming up with new plot ideas, then this is for you. In every detective show, there’s always a special board with tacks and some red yarn that is used to connect pieces of evidence in an investigation. It's a good way for everyone working on the team to be able to see the progress of the case. Likewise, this same system can be used as a storyboarding tool for authors to connect plot points and visualize a story as a whole.
Grab some yarn, post-it notes, tacks, and if you have a cork board, grab that too. Write an idea for a scene in a story on a post-it and tack it to the board. As you start to come up with more ideas at random, keep sticking them on the board, then wind the yarn around each tack so that the events are in chronological order, and by looking at the board, you’re able to keep track of a rough plot outline. If you don’t have a cork board, a magnetic board will work too, or even a big piece of paper and some tape to stick the yarn in place. You can either use the board to just brainstorm plot ideas and take them down or leave it up throughout your writing process so you have a clear idea of what to write next to make your story complete.
Where to Start?
Stories are vastly important in our world, they can be entertainment, escapes, or an opportunity to learn something new. We couldn’t function without literature and stories. As the creators of these stories, writers are just as important. We are the conduits through which these stories enter the world. While coming up with new ideas can be difficult, there are plenty of ways that we as writers can come up with new and original ideas without having to strain ourselves or putting a spin on the same tropes we’ve read over and over. Whether you’d like to go out in search of new ideas through some observation and a change of environment, or you’d like to stay at home and try some crafty new ways of coming up with a plot or a setting, I hope you’ve found something that sparks your interest and gets you writing, whether it's an idea for a new character or an interesting new land that you’ve invented. Keep working and take a peek at our blog for more ideas to help you get your latest project started!
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