Storywriting guide, Part 2: Generating ideas

Once your everyday life is accompanied by imagined scenarios, you're ready to continue on.

There are plenty of methods to generating ideas.

Firstly, you want to read plenty, watch plenty of films, listen to a lot of music, and just enjoy yourself doing it. Find out what you like more than other things and just keep with it. Keep learning what you like about stories you experience, and what you don't like. At one point, the "I don't like it" will turn into "I'd do it differently", and then it will become "I would do it this way" and then you'll imagine the story moving in the direction you would have moved it in.

Slowly, you will recognise patterns in stories that you didn't before, and things will click. Some questions about why so many stories are so similar will be explainable, and usually, the explanation is "Because it works". If you enjoyed it, if it had a lasting impact, it just worked.

Now onto the methods:

1. The first method is to, once you've looked into enough books and films, is to look into what's going on in your head. If you're watching anything, experiencing a story, and your imagination is always on, waiting for something to trigger it, you will get images and scenes in your head. These scenes will be based on something you might have seen or read, and that's okay because a setting and one scene won't make the whole story if you don't let it. It will only build the foundations.

2. The second method is used when something is happening in your life, and this moment feels like it could make it into a story. It might not be the biggest plot point, but you can embed it as a starting point to writing a story. Whatever happens in your life, there was build-up towards, it, and there is going to be a conclusion to this situation too, but while you're going through it, you might want to see how much you'd enjoy experiencing it if you cranked it up a little.

3. Listen to the stories people around you have to tell, if they don't mind, you can use their stories as premises to your own, kind of linking the first two methods where it is a real story, but somebody told it to you.

If you've got this scene and image in your head, let it sink in, and keep it in there and see where it branches out as you let your mind wonder around it.