How to Come Up with Ideas

Do you want to write a book/tv show/video game/movie/play, but you don’t know what to write about? Fear not!

I’m writing a short story series, and with every short story having a different plot (barring three two-part stories) I need to come up with a lot of plot ideas. Here’s just some of the ways that I figure out my next story or character.

1. Write everything down

The first way to get the most out of creating ideas is to write every idea down when you have them, even if you don’t need them right away. Create a single ideas document or break it out into Setting Ideas versus Character Ideas and so on. Record voice memos on the go and jot them down in the doc later. Every idea. Big, small, even things for different genres. You never know when they’re going to come in handy. You’re not going to remember every idea you have, so you need to keep track of them for inspiration later on.

2. What if?

A lot of my ideas take inspiration from real life, but with a twist.

Once I was staring in my mirror and saw a fly buzzing around behind me. When I turned, it was gone. I looked back in the mirror again, and there it was again! This led me to think, “What if there was a magical creature you needed to capture, but couldn’t see?” And thus, “Gertie and Bridget deal with a pest” was born!

Sometimes the best way to come up with a story that intrigues you is to ask ‘what if?’. What if a vampire and a human fell in love? From that you get Twilight. What if you take the media sensationalism of the horrors children face in war-torn countries to its extreme? Hunger Games! What if there was a real-life treasure hunt in an MMO? Ready Player One!

Those might seem like examples limited to modern day genres, but it works anywhere. What if space exploration were possible, and a group of humans and aliens worked together to find the mysteries of the universe? Star Trek. What if in a medieval society a plot to overthrow a king went out of hand and started a five-way civil war? Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire. Sure, the questions get longer, but there’s still one basic idea at play.

Find something that you’re passionate about and ask yourself what could be different. The magic in my Tales of Mundane Magic universe came about when I started wondering if magic was like a coding language, and grew from that.

3. Creativity begets creativity

Some people love listening to music. Others enjoy watching television shows and movies. One of the main reasons I haven’t done much reading as of late is because every time I pick up a book, I get a couple chapters in and feel so inspired that I have to go work on my book. Sometimes people prefer crafts that are entirely different from their own – seeing a play, looking at art, listening to the symphony. When you intake someone else’s creative work, it helps you become inspired to make your own creation, because of how much you loved what you experienced. Find an option, or many, that work for you and go for it.

4. What would you do instead?

When I’m feeling stuck creatively, I love watching YouTube analyses of movies (and I highly recommend Lindsay Ellis and/or Folding Ideas for this). Somehow watching somebody analyze existing media, both its highlights and faults, makes me think “How would I have done this?”

This is a shortcut for something you can do whenever you’re reading/watching/listening to a work in your chosen medium. If you’re a writer, when you’re reading (and not trying to relax) you should constantly be trying to figure out what’s going to happen next. You should think about what you think is going to happen, what you think should happen, and how you would write what you think should happen.

I was once watching a YouTube series that was built on mystery and intrigue, and I predicted what the big secret was that had yet to be revealed. And then the series got canceled, so I never found out what it actually was.

But that was almost preferable, because I was able to take the ideas that I had for the series, and twist them around into my own project that was completely unrelated, but inspired by the series.

If you have ideas for coming up with ideas, please comment below!