Ideas on Demand
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Part 1 of a three-part article
by Lisa Harkrader
Where do you get your ideas? As writers, we hear that question all the time. Our usual response is: “Ideas are everywhere. I’ve got more ideas than I’ll ever use.”
But what if you need a specific idea for a specific kind of story, and you need it by a specific date? What if you want to enter a contest that has a theme and a deadline? Or you hear about a magazine editor who needs a short story for her holiday issue? Or you get a regular writing assignment and must come up with a new topic once a month? How do you force your brain to spit out good ideas?
In the first installment of a three-part article, freelance writers offer suggestions on brainstorming story ideas.
Pull It Out of Your Hat
“I’m one of those obsessive compulsive people who has ideas thrumming through their head all the time,” says Jeanie Ransom, who’s been a full-time freelance writer for 25 years. “I write them all down, and then, when I am stuck, I go to my handy-dandy idea book and pull something out.”
The key to a successful idea book is to write down everything that seems interesting—funny names, words you like, possible story titles, weird things you hear on the news. Anything that catches your attention. I’m not organized enough to keep a notebook, so I write all those loose, oddball ideas on whatever scrap of paper is handy, and throw them into a box.
Sometimes a contest or a magazine’s theme list is just what you need to turn those snippets of ideas into stories. “Go through your idea drawer or notebooks and look at old ideas with the new one superimposed over it,” advises Terry Miller Shannon, who has sold over 200 stories and has written the monthly fiction series for Touch magazine.
Ask a Question
“Look at newspaper articles and other fiction and ask what if?” advises Dori Hillestad Butler, author of many books for children, including The Great Tooth Fairy Rip-off and Trading Places With Tank Talbott. “What if the character were older? What if it was a boy instead of a girl? And what if instead of burying a time capsule, the boy was digging one up?”
Marjorie Ellert Berg, whose credits for both online and print publications include a monthly column, “Surfing Seniors,” for Suite101.com, often uses the “What If?” approach. “An editor sent me a note about an anthology he was editing and asked if I had anything I wanted to send. It was winter and my kids were playing in a backyard snow fort. As I watched them, I thought about what they would do when the snow melted. Within an hour, I had written the first draft of ‘Spring, Spring, Stay Away.’”
Whine About It
This is a technique I stumbled onto by accident. My writing buddy and I email each other several times a day, bouncing stories off each other, reporting our writing progress, and critiquing each other’s work.
And whenever I’m stuck for specific ideas, I send her an email complaining about how I can’t come up with anything. Then I started noticing something—somewhere in the middle of my cyber-grousing, story ideas would begin to crystallize. Almost every time. So now I use it to my advantage. If I’m really stuck, I whine about it to my friend.
Read more brainstorming tips next Thursday in Part 2 of “Ideas on Demand.”
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