How cool would it be if, for one month, you sat down and wrote a completely original short story every single morning?
Can you imagine all of that material? That’s enough stories for you to publish your own short story collection!
It’s a nice dream isn’t it? But that’s probably all it will ever be: just a dream. And, as far as dreams go, this one seems pretty far fetched. The amount of new and creative ideas that you would have to come up with on a constant bases would be a bit overwhelming.
I have enough trouble coming up with ideas to write about on this blog, how could I ever come up with a completely original story every morning?
Well, do you want to know a secret? I can, and I do. Coming up with great story ideas is pretty simple, because I’m not at the mercy of a muse who may or may not grant me a good story idea every once and a while. It’s the other way around.
I know how to make the muse work for me.
Every morning, to warm up my fingers and my mind for all the writing I do throughout the day, I spend an hour or so coming up with, and writing, a completely original short story or poem. Nothing to big, my stories are simple, and normally end up being somewhere in the area of 700 words long. It usually would only take about 45 minutes to complete the entire process—from first coming up with the idea, to putting on the finishing touches and a quick edit—but I enjoy taking the extra time to indulge my creativity and really get the juices flowing.
Now, of course not everything I produce this way is spectacular; but that’s okay because the point of this exercise isn’t to be spectacular.
The point is to practice: to get more experience with my creative writing, to put more hours toward my mastery of storytelling (it takes 10,000 hours to become a master, you know), to potentially create some new content to publish in the library, and, sometimes even more important than all the rest, to start every day on a productive note.
I know, the thought of coming up with a new idea every single day sounds daunting; and honestly, it used to be terrifying to me. But in reality, it’s easier than you think.
Coming up with ideas on a consistent bases is a skill, not a gift. You don’t need divine inspiration from the muse, you need practice.
And lucky for you, I know a few techniques that make coming up with awesome and creative ideas easier much than the effort it took to drag yourself out of bed this morning.
Yes, that’s right. There are proven techniques for coming up with ideas to write about. You don’t have to wait to be inspired to write great stories; and you don’t have to rely on the ever popular method of staring at a blank screen and praying that the muse gives you something to write about. It’s so much easier when you can go and find the ideas for yourself.
And the best way I know for finding ideas are the techniques that I use every morning for my writing warm up—the techniques that I want to share with you now…
1. Chunking
What it is: chunking is basically a word association exercise, except with ideas. The main idea behind chunking is to get as many loosely related ideas on paper as you can in a certain amount of time. Once you have a good pool to choose from, then you find a way to connect the different ideas. That will create the conflict from which your story can grow.
How to do it:
- Start by writing a seed idea in the center of a piece of paper and set a timer (I like to set mine for fifteen minutes).
- Start the timer and go! Branch off from the seed idea by putting down the words or ideas that you can directly connect to the seed. Then continue branching out on that line of idea association until you feel you’ve exhausted that branch.
- Your goal is to get at least three branches that connect to the seed, but not necessarily each other. Your story will emerge from the connections that you can draw between the branches.
I particularly like this technique because it allows me to clearly see how the ideas interact with eachother and it allows me to plan the best story that I can without all the guess work that typically comes with a first draft.
And on top of that, it gives me permission to make a mess of a perfectly good piece of paper (as you can see).
Above is a picture from my notebook of the chunking I did for the short story “to see a fish.” You can’t really read it because I have doctor hand writing, but the idea progression goes something like this…
Seed: fish
Branch One: fish > pond > park > walk in the park
Branch Two: fish > scales > reflection > jumping out of water > ripples
Branch Three: fish > big fish stories > old men > memories
And from the connections I saw between these three branches, one of my most successful short-short stories was born.
2. Free writing
What it is: freewriting is much less complicated than the chunking technique—and of the five techniques I use, it’s also the most fun. Basically, freewriting is allowing your creativity to flow, completely uninhibited, from your mind to the page.
How to do it:
- Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
- Decide on a simple seed idea or writing prompt.
- Write without thinking. Do not allow your mind to consider what you’re going to write next, just write.
- Never stop writing, no matter what. Even if you literally have to type out “I don’t know what else to write,” don’t stop writing until the fifteen minutes are up.
- Once you finish you should have a fairly good collection of ideas and ramblings related to your seed that you can pick from to create your story.
Freewriting is an invaluable skill for you to practice; not only because it’s an effective way of coming up with ideas, but also because it’s one of the best techniques you can use to break through writers block.
Use it.
3. Seesaw
What is it: the seesaw is a bit more of a hands on technique than free writing or chunking. What I mean by that is this: when you use this technique, you’re not actually coming up with ideas for stories, you’re actually writing a story and making it up as you go.
How to do it: the core idea behind the seesaw is to start with a character and give them something that they want. Next take that thing away from them. How do they get it back? Now what’s stoping them from getting it back?
- The seesaw is basically just a micro try-fail cycle: the hero wants something, he tries to get it, fails, tries again, fails, tries again, and so on until he either succeeds or fails and can’t/won’t try again.
- The thing that carries this technique through is the character. Start with an interesting character, give them an interesting desire, and the rest takes care of itself.
Using these techniques, just like the writing itself, takes lots practice and time master.
Like all things worth doing it will be difficult at first but the more you do it the easier it gets and the better you get at it. That being said, even when these techniques are still new and difficult for you, they still make coming up with ideas a whole lot easier than… other methods. So no more blank screens and blinking cursors for you!
Here’s a challenge for you to make your introduction to these techniques a little more interesting: go for one week, writing one short story or poem, every single day. Think you can pull that off?