One of the questions best selling novelists get the most from readers and potential authors alike is “Where do you get your ideas?”
It often seems there’s some kind of formula, as if we expect authors to say, “I read the news and something will grab me” or “I sit on my front porch staring at nature at the same time every day.” In reality, the formula is much harder and at the same time much easier than expected.
The short answer is, you can train yourself to get ideas for novels.
The procedure
At first, you’re doing some random action without thinking, and suddenly an idea comes to you. It’s so powerful you can’t neglect it. You HAVE to write it. This is so often the case, you’d think it must be impossible to sit down with a legal pad, number one through fifty, and write down fifty ideas for novels.
But that’s exactly what I want you to do.
Sit down at your writing space (this is important), take a legal pad or your writer’s notebook, and number 1 through 50 on a page. If it’s your writer’s notebook, those tend to be small, so I recommend you allow three lines per number. Legal pad, two lines. You need enough room to write out the log line.
Set a timer. Stare at the pad or notebook. At the end of the first session, you’ll probably have two things written down.
By the end of the 30th session, you’ll be getting around six to eight ideas for novels.
Aim for two hundred.
Does this work?
You better believe it. It’s not some mystical zen thing, because I don’t believe in that. What you’re doing is programming your brain to sit in your writer’s space, stare at the pad, and write down story ideas. If you do this every day for 21 days,it becomes an ingrained habit – space plus notebook equals story idea generating.
The ideas start pouring out.
Can I prove this? I’m asking you to dedicate 30 minutes a day to something you don’t know will work. How can I guarantee it will work?
Painters. Artists who work in oils do exactly this. They sit in their studio (writing space) staring at a blank canvas (writer’s notebook), trying to train themselves to see where to paint the first stroke of a forest, or a bridge, or a heron wading in a pool.
And it works.
There’s entire buildings (called galleries) where you can go see if this works or not. Ask an artist – “How do you see what you’re going to paint?”
An unexpected benefit of this is you’ll see people rushing past you, and you’ll recognize the seed of a story. “They’re in a hurry because someone is holding their child hostage.”
Conclusion
Getting ideas is easy once you train yourself to do this. It actually took me thirty days to get this ingrained, and now I can get story ideas easily. Whether they are good story ideas or not is a question that time will tell. The story ideas that survive are the good ones – that’s why you generate two hundred story ideas, in hopes that ten of them will be good. Thirty days from now, you should have a list of stories to get you started.
