Hi. My name is Angry (Travis if you don’t like using internet nicknames), and I’m going to start a new discussion called “Let’s Talk About…” and each one will talk about something different that has to do with you, writing, editing, publishing, and possibly even reading.<\/p>\n
Today, Let’s Talk About…Story Ideas<\/strong><\/p>\n Right. So. You want to write a story\/book, but you think your ideas are weak, or you cannot come up with good plot. Maybe you just need a little push to get going in one direction, and then as you get writing, it’s like a snowball roll down a mountain.<\/p>\n I’m going to talk about where ideas come from, and how you can start coming up with them on your own. The first thing you are going to need to succeed at this is a good imagination. You don’t necessarily need to be Calvin from the best comic strip ever, “Calvin & Hobbes”, but if you have that kind if imagination (I’m one of those weird kids that grew up into a weird old man), you are already a writer…you just need to pick up a pen or a keyboard and get writing.<\/p>\n Most people are not like this, and if they are, they are already writing and have no need of advice. Everyone else, maybe these will give you some ideas, or help you learn to strengthen your imagination. Like physical exercise, writing, playing a video game over and over, if you practice something enough, you will get better, stronger, maybe even faster at it.<\/p>\n Your boring, mundane, everyday life is the greatest source of your ideas.<\/strong><\/p>\n You may not think so, but the truth is, the little things in life are what make for great stories. The greater your imagination, the greater the story. Start with small things.<\/p>\n Example: have you ever been sitting around, watching a show, or maybe driving along, whatever you are doing, and thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”\u00a0 I have these all the time.<\/p>\n Wouldn’t it be cool if…<\/em><\/p>\n The optometrist was giving you an eye exam and found some kind of…microchip at the back of your eye?<\/p>\n You were seeing a psychiatrist for something…say depression or ADHD, and during the course of the visit, the doctor accidentally stumbled on some crazy secret or scheme or formula that had been purposely buried in your memories?<\/p>\n You found one of the toys in a cereal box, and instead of being some cheap plastic junk item, it was some crazy piece of technology or even an alien artifact that had weird effects or powers?<\/p>\n You opened the door of your house to leave and instead of the outside, it was a different planet\/dimension\/universe\/timeline?<\/p>\n You were driving home from work or wherever, and the radio suddenly starting blaring the emergency signal because a massive disaster was happening or starting to happen?<\/p>\n Once you have the basic idea, then you just have to apply your imagination to build on it.<\/strong> Let’s take the ‘radio emergency signal’ one, because I love writing about apoc\/disaster\/invasion stuff.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So you hear the emergency radio signal. What does it say? Is it an asteroid headed to earth? Is it an alien space ship? Is it a supervolcano erupting? A nuclear strike? Pick a good disaster, either country-wide or world-wide. I’m going to pick the “CERN super-collider was testing something and they accidentally opened a portal to another dimension” one (think in terms of the video game “Half-Life” if you’ve played it).<\/p>\n You don’t need to know hard science, you can have the radio announcer say “an accident in Switzerland at the CERN facility has caused mass death in a two thousand kilometer radius” because let’s face it, radio and news people are only going to give you details once the event is over and everyone has had time to study it.<\/p>\n Okay, so I’m driving along, and the EBS (Emergency Broadcast System if you are American) goes crazy. The announcer tells you barely anything useful other than get to safety quickly (you can google the EBS warnings and listen to some for ideas on how they are announced).<\/em><\/p>\n Now we need a major plot device. The CERN boys opened a portal to…somewhere. Hell? The 9th Dimension? A parallel earth in another universe? The 34th Century? I’m going to say they opened a black hole that somehow has grown too large and is now sucking the earth into it.<\/p>\n As I was driving home, the EBS signal blared on the car’s radio. The announcer said we should take shelter immediately as a national disaster was happening. It becomes a madhouse getting home, people are starting to panic within minutes. I finally get home and turn on the news. Drone and spy plane images and even satellite images are showing a 600km wide hole to…nothing, and it is growing about two kilometers an hour. Some scientists think the hole will grow faster as it eats more matter from our planet. Now everyone is going crazy. Those living near it in Europe are basically dead already, but they’ll do anything in a panic to try and survive. They are like rats in a cage that has been put in a fire.<\/em><\/p>\n With just that paragraph of ‘concept<\/strong>‘ you can probably get 3-10 pages, maybe more of a story going. You can take the concept out even further, maybe all the way until the main character (and maybe his family?) are about to die \/ get sucked into the hole…or maybe I (I’m in first-person, you can be whatever you want) decide it is better to give my wife and kids a ‘suicide’ pill combo that will just put us to sleep and we’ll never wake up because that is less horrifying than waiting for a black hole arrive. Go wherever your story takes you.<\/p>\n A Helpful Tool<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the most important things I ever did was get a spiral notebook and a good pen. For some of you, this might be your iPad or tablet. Or your phone. Or a yellow legal tablet and a pencil. Or maybe just a pocket notebook. I keep mine near me whenever I am at home, because I never know when I will get an idea.<\/p>\n Sometimes the pages have just a sentence or three of an idea I wrote down like “robot dreams of being more than cleaning bot, signs up for a mining gig out past Jupiter”. I got this from watching one of the new Roomba commercials.<\/p>\n Sometimes I have a concept that is 2-3 written pages. Sometimes I go through and find a single sentence here and there and can combine them: Disgraced Vatican bishop and hacker-priest are tasked to perform an exorcism on an AI that thinks it is Satan. During the course of the story, the Vatican has to grapple with whether or not AI’s might have souls, if AI’s could believe in God. (I got this from an entry that said: Skynet meets The Exorcist + another entry that said: Catholic Church has to declare AI’s ‘people’ and they have souls).<\/p>\n What works for me might not work for you. I make no guarantees that anything you’ve read here will help you, but I’m pretty hopeful that it will. The biggest pieces of advice beyond this I can give is as follows:<\/p>\n 1. Write. Every day. Write. Always write, even when you don’t want to. Just write something.<\/p>\n 2. See #1<\/p>\n 3. Practice every aspect of writing. Writing is more than just putting words on a screen or paper. Using your imagination to build ideas, worlds, scenes, etc. is essential. Your imagination is as important as your writing skills.<\/p>\n 4. Find what works for you and make it into a habit. Good habits will help you practice which will in turn strengthen your writing muscle \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n You can catch me at angrygames.tumblr.com<\/a> or on Twitter @Angry_Games<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hi. My name is Angry (Travis if you don’t like using internet nicknames), and I’m going to start a new discussion called “Let’s Talk About…” and each one will talk about something different that has to do with you, writing, … Continue reading