Okay, it’s time for another post about writing (because I like to write about writing, apparently).  This one is about story ideas!

Story ideas are lots of fun and can feel really precious, but are actually pretty darned easy to come by.  This, of course, is not news.  It seems like nearly every writer’s blog I’ve read has some variation on the idea that story ideas are the easy part of writing (the actual writing is way more work!), or that story ideas are downright cheap.

For myself, I am definitely guilty of hoarding my favorite story ideas, like a dragon with precious, precious jewels.  But, at the same time, I have kind of a large hoard (especially compared to my much more modest hoard of finished stories).  So that right there already rather proves the point.  I rarely go actively looking for story ideas, and yet they still accumulate, faster than I, personally, can use them.

Even still, sometimes one does want to deliberately go looking for new story ideas, whether it’s to fit some need that’s come up, or just to try something new.  Great!  Story ideas are easy.  For me and my brain, an easy idea generator works like this:

1. Pick something I like or think is beautiful.
2. Pick something I dislike or think is ugly.
3. Find a way to smash them together to make them awesome!  (This will take some iterating.)

But for the basic idea, that’s it.

I’ve got to include something wonderful in my story, because I need to love my story in order to motivate myself to put in the hard work of writing it.  But I also need to include something hard or challenging that will wake up the problem-solving part of my brain.  Just cooing over lovely things won’t do that.  But problem-solving and creativity are just two sides of the same coin, and they both often require a motivating factor.  My brain likes a challenge (to a sometimes annoying degree).

So, here’s an example:

1. Something I like: forests
2. Something I dislike: shopping malls
3. Smash them together:  A shopping mall for purchasing forests!

Okay, not quite done, but it’s a good start.

Why is there a shopping mall for buying forests?  Maybe the shoppers are literal world builders.  That would be cool.  But that implies a need for a certain amount of variety.  Maybe some of the stores sell whole forests, but most sell, like components of forests.  Get a good insect population here!  Get your soil substrates here!

But of course some people will want to go really bespoke.  They don’t want to just slap a whole world together, with generic-component forests.  They are artistes! and they don’t want the finished product, they just want the tools for sculpting or crafting components…maybe for other world-builders to buy.

So, really, rather than shopping world-builders, maybe it would be more interesting to focus a story on someone who works in a crafting-components shop.  That would give the story the opportunity to get down into cool, weird details of the specialized tools used, or a particular project for a particular client.

In fact, by the end of turning this story idea into a story, the shopping-mall part may not survive at all, or maybe just be barely there.  You really don’t have to keep the components you picked in steps 1 and 2; you just have to follow the thread to something awesome.

And then remember, the work of writing is really the part where you turn the cool idea into a well-crafted story.  And there are a lot of choices to be made between the one and the other.

Does anyone want the story idea of a shopping mall for forests and/or world-builders and/or world-piece crafters?  You’re welcome to it if so – I don’t need it.  Ideas are cheap and I have a lot of them.  This one isn’t quite shiny enough (to me) to fit into my hoard at the present time…but it’s enough that I could run with it, if for some reason I needed something…

Happy dreaming.  And happy writing.