Before I started writing regularly, I used to be afraid I would run out of words. It’s weird, I know, but that fear is one of the things that kept me from writing for many years. I wasn’t confident I had enough ideas, enough interesting things to say, let alone many interesting things to say.
To be honest, my fears were not unwarranted. It was hard to get started. I couldn’t think of anything to write about. Most of the “stories” I wrote ended up being descriptions of places or character sketches, filled with exposition, flashbacks, and cliché dream sequences. My stories did not have actual plots. I started carrying a tiny notebook with me everywhere I went so I could write down things I observed out in the world or ideas that came to me. The notebook did come in handy—it was gradually filled with grocery shopping lists and reminders about dental appointments.
Once I sat down to write, getting the words to come out was difficult. I became more and more convinced that, during the years I hadn’t been writing, my writing muscles and my coming-up-with-ideas-for-things-to-write-about muscles had not only atrophied, but had withered away to nothing. But reader, I kept carrying that little notebook around, and I kept sitting down at my computer and typing words and writing truly awful stories, and gradually, my writing began to improve.
As for coming up with ideas for stories, there are several things that have helped me become confident that I will never run out of ideas. Here are the three things that have helped me the most, and I hope they help you too:
1. Life Is a Bowl of Cherries … and a Cornucopia of Story Ideas
First, I had the realization that I have lived over 20,000 days on this planet, and on every single one of those days, I’ve done something or something has happened to me or I’ve witnessed something happen to someone else. I’ve experienced some things. Although the best fiction isn’t based on a rote recitation of our own life experiences, even the tiniest little experience can become the germ of an idea for a story.
Here are some of the mundane things that have sparked story ideas for me as I’ve gone about living my life: getting an invitation to a family reunion in the mail; a weird fortune I got in a fortune cookie; reading an interesting article online about dogs; an encounter with a valet at a hotel; a dream about my grandmother; meeting someone interesting at a local concert in the park on my lunch hour; trying a new recipe that didn’t turn out very well; an ex-boyfriend commenting on my weight. When I’m stuck, I think of a little thing from the past or something that sparked my interest during the day, then imagine and extrapolate from there.
2. There’s Magic in The Mash-Up
My second idea came from Stephen King’s On Writing. I like to call it The Mash-Up. In his craft book On Writing, King describes the way he came up with the idea for his novel Carrie by combining two completely unrelated ideas: adolescent cruelty and telekinesis. He got those ideas from two places: a teenaged memory about a school locker room and an article he read in LIFE magazine on telekinesis. (The Guardian published an excerpt of King’s account of coming up with the idea for Carrie, so you can read about it in “Stephen King: How I Wrote Carrie,” but I recommend reading the entire book too.) What isn’t mentioned in the excerpt is that King goes on to say he often comes up with ideas for his stories by mashing up two unrelated ideas. I now do the same. One of my favorite stories I’ve written grew out of a mash-up of two ideas: one was a piece of trivia I heard about the human voice and the other was a weird music phenomenon I read about in a science magazine.
3. The Idea Factory
The thing that has helped me the most with building the confidence that I am a creative person who can come up with ideas for stories is … coming up with ideas for stories. This is something I learned from author Jill Alexander Essbaum. I took her advice and started incorporating writing exercises into my morning routine. Creativity begets creativity, my friends. And practice makes perfect.
But there is one particular exercise Essbaum turned me onto that has helped me the most: I write the beginning of a new short story each and every morning. That means I have to come up for an idea for a new short story every morning, on the fly. And it’s nuts, but I always do! Some of them turn out to be total crap, of course. Okay, many of them turn out to be total crap that I never finish. But there is the occasional gem that I eventually turn into something. There are enough gems that I am never at a loss for a gem to polish. And most importantly, I now know that I can come up with an idea for a new short story any damned time I want for the rest of my life.
Speaking of big ideas, author Will Durant created his own mash-up from two of Aristotle’s quotes.
Aristotle wrote this:
“As it is not one swallow or a fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”
And this:
“[T]hese virtues are formed in man by his doing the right actions.”
What Durant wrote in his book The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers was this:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Writing, thinking, being creative, coming up with story ideas—these things are like muscles. If we don’t use them, we do not lose them. They may get flabby, but they don’t go away. They are always there for us to begin using again. If you keep thinking and keep writing and keep trying, you will work those creativity muscles, and they, in turn, will begin to work for you.