I know that it is highly unlikely that I will be the first person ever to write a story about a particular thought or series of events. I intend to write anyway, and no matter how unoriginal the plot or characters or sentence structure or language are, I intend to write with my unique voice. As such, I think it is okay to search for ideas through existing media and mould stories around them.
I have found childhood memories and personal experiences - especially from travel - are great for authentic pieces of writing, probably due to the detailed images that I am able to retrieve from my memory bank and describe. Old photos, too, can trigger great detail for stories, eg. smells. Of course, sometimes my memories require a bit of tweaking and twisting to ensure that they become 'a story' rather than a jumble of gumph.
Writing Children's Books for Dummies offers the following ideas for stories (that needn't be confined to children's stories judging by recent television programs): fairy tales, fables, mythology, nursery rhymes and bible stories. These generally don't have copyright, but beware of those versions that do, eg. Disney stories.
The Writing School Guide to Writing the Short Story by Roy Lomax offers a list of proverbs as story ideas. (Week 4 will suggest some of these for developing a plot).
People-watching can also provide great material. Try (surreptitiously) eavesdropping on strangers and writing a story that fills in the blanks of their conversation in narrative or dialogue or both.
Magazine articles (with a 'what if...?' applied) and news items are full of stories.
Word association and brain storming activities, alone or in a group, can also help with story ideas and will be used in the following exercises. I have borrowed these from a creative writing course that I completed in 2011.
The exercises aim to continue ignoring the inner critic by opening the channels of unlikely story ideas.
Exercise Five. Pick one (or more) word from each column and write a short story about or including these words.
Who
|
What
|
Where
|
When
|
Astronaut
|
Depression
|
Hell
|
In the future
|
Mr Micklemaker
|
Magic
|
House
|
Middle Ages
|
Dancer
|
Death
|
Farm
|
Now
|
Jane
|
Music
|
Distant galaxy
|
1960’s
|
Detective
|
Mushrooms
|
Jungle/forest
|
Last week
|
Princess
|
Elephant
|
City
|
1980’s
|
Exercise Six. Working from left to right, use word association to fill in the blanks, and then select five words from the whole table to incorporate into a description, short story or outline of a longer story.
| Night | ||||
| Bees | ||||
| Water | ||||
| Breakfast | ||||
| Paper |
Week 4 will expand on story ideas by looking at plot.
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