Where Do Those Stories Come From?

I have an author friend who says her ideas come to her in her sleep – she dreams about her plots. For me, I like to play “What If?”; I watch a TV show, read a newspaper article, or even review my day and I wonder what would have happened IF… Suppose someone missed getting onto that elevator and by the time they reached the floor they were going to, the job had already gone to someone else. Or maybe the student grabbed the wrong notebook and didn’t get their homework in on time and sat in detention instead of riding the bus home where the neighborhood bully was waiting for him? For every action there is a reaction – so change one thing in the chain of events and you have a whole different story.

Every day you read a newspaper or watch your daily news broadcast , you are being flooded with ideas for stories. Create a character (Jimmy?) and put that character into the middle of the news story – how would Jimmy have responded? Would Jimmy have been a hero and pulled people from crashed automobiles? Maybe Jimmy was the masked bank robber and he didn’t pull the trigger? Or maybe it was Jimmy’s house that burned in that fatal house fire? Read a headline and make it your own story. Invent characters and make them react to the circumstances the way their character would.

Your characters are important. My characters tend to write their own stories, my job as the author is to keep them on track. When I create a character, I create their history and their histories motivate them. If you were bitten by a strange dog as a child, you might have a remaining fear of loose dogs – so would your character, so they might cross the street if there was a strange dog tide to a parking meter. Maybe your female character just got divorced after finding that her husband had multiple affairs throughout the marriage – perhaps she’ll be overly cautious about trusting again or entering into another serious relationship. Create your character and then drop them into the middle of any news item and let them simply react.

Another possibility for a story idea is to use one that is already out there. No, I am not talking about plagiarism. Understand that there are only so many stories, it is the telling, the perspectives and sometimes minor differences that make the story yours. Remember that both Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story are tragic stories of forbidden love and both are classic stories. Next time you watch a TV show, re-think it in your mind changing the perspective the story is told from – instead of telling it as the detective in a murder mystery, tell it from the victim’s viewpoint.

Think about your own day. How would things have been different if you said something differently or made a different decision than you did? What possibilities would have been opened, what opportunities might have presented themselves, what goals might have been attained? When you write fiction, it doesn't have to be real, it just has to be… a story. You can take any piece of life that you’ve experienced or seem and turn it into a story… or the next great novel.


Writing exercise: Write yourself a letter and tell yourself everything that you did today – but you are telling to another you, one that wasn’t there with you today.

Writing prompt: There is a meme on a popular social network where you give yourself different names based on random facts: 1) Soap Opera name [middle name and street you live on]; 2) Superhero name [color of your shirt, first item to your immediate left]; 3) Star Wars name [first three letters of last name, first two of middle name, first two of first, last three of last]. Write one sentence about each of the characters these names represent.