Hello,
Since I’m not teaching creative writing again for the foreseeable future (I mostly teach Masters courses these days and they’re all Literacy or Literature-based), I decided to share some tips, pointers and notes from the creative writing classes I’ve been teaching at both the BA and MA level since 2011.
Today’s tip is how I always have more ideas than I can shake a stick with an entire paper journal (or more) of prompts and story seeds. These are responsible for about 80% of the stories I’ve had published (the rest tend to occur in another fertile playing ground, the unconscious. I’ve had some totally whack dreams that I’ve turned into stories — that sold).
Developing Story-Seeds and Ideas: A Practical Approach
1. Identify an RL incident that sticks out in recent memory.
2. 5 random sense-prompts (literally a sense per prompt, then divide that into nouns that represent themes, images, metaphors — your choice).
3. Build a POV around #1 and augment with #2.
Rinse and repeat. This is how I get 80% of my story ideas. After which my next step is “but make it scifi” or “but make it fantasy” or “throw x in it”. Then the next step is “twist it and shake it till it does not represent #1 in any way, shape or form”.
Of course, sometimes ideas appear organically to you. I’ll be in a situation or see something and I go “What if this happened instead?”
But I tend to (and your mileage may vary) distrust “organic” ideas in a sense that I never reproduce them verbatim. Because you never know if it’s been done before. So my “twist it and shake it” still applies. It’s a trick I learned from an old chatroom buddy way back in the 90s who was a creative writing grad. He was deeply critical of my stories.
In my creative writing classes I took my students through journalling the initial “what if” and then constructing the storyworld/plot. But I also say, “sometimes that all flies out the window when you start writing, and that’s okay. This is a guide to help you develop your storyworld and build your narrative”.
These ideas, you may not use them immediately or all at once. But if you journal them or keep a book with story-seeds, you’ll always be in a state of abundance during dry spells or when you’re feeling super unmotivated. You still have to do the work of writing the story (and that’s never easy) but if you cultivate this abundance it will go a long way.
These ideas I share as a remedy for that really toxic habit of some writers to “write out of spite” or steal ideas from friends, enemies, frenemies, ex-friends so that they can perform one-upmanship. Of course, it is not a remedy for the foibles of human nature. That, is up to you and your conscience and what you are able to live with. Being a good writer and being a good person is not necessarily mutually exclusive but you really have to work at both. And yes, it is a lifelong struggle. Ask yourself what kind of success would make you happier in the long run. What you can live with, thirty years from now. What gives you more joy and satisfaction. As always, none of this is meant to be prescriptive despite my very strong feelings about ethics in writing.