All around you.
The mysterious neighbor two houses down who comes outside to get the mail in a parka every afternoon.
The odd smell at the grocery store you frequent (Rotting produce? Dead body? Human meat behind the butcher’s counter?).
The tricks behind the beauty of the rose garden in the park you run in.
Little things like this often lead to ideas for poems, books, short stories, and screenplays. You just have to be willing to take on the challenge of developing these ideas into premises, outlines, and then the storytelling format of your choosing.
Stop Second-Guessing Initial Ideas
Often, when new writers say they “don’t know what to write about,” that’s not entirely accurate. There are likely dozens of ideas that have crossed your mind, but you’ve rejected them the moment they popped into your head.
If you stop doing this, you’ll find you have more ideas than you know what to do with. No matter what kind of idea you have, it will need to be developed into something people are going to want to buy. When you doubt or reject ideas just because they come to you half-baked, you just make extra work for yourself.
There Are No Truly Original Ideas
Most avid readers understand this concept. Consider romance. It’s an chunk of the book market worth more than $1 billion. And it’s all based on a single, simple premise: Two people meet and fall in love.
No reinventing the wheel. No sleepless nights agonizing over the concept. Just taking what’s already working and tweaking it, ever so slightly.
The only thing that’s new about any particular premise is the way it is executed by the writer and their editing team.
Do two people fall in love or three? Do a man and man fall in love? Were they friends first or strangers? Were the enemy combatants or feuding neighbors? Do they live in the same flat or across the world from one another?
People often buy the same premise over and over again. It’s comfortable. They like it. They generally know what they’re getting. They want the same ideas for the most part, they just like the way Amy Tan wrote it or Quentin Tarantino presented it or Maya Angelou expressed it. But, as noted in the premise creation lesson, any story (fictional or factual) you can find to write about will involve someone seeking a particular goal and having a hard time of achieving. That’s it!
So, once you have a goal and some obstacles, you’ve got a big chunk of the premise work done.
Check out the ideation lesson for more info on coming up with ideas for your next fiction or nonfiction endeavor!
