Stuck on how to begin your best selling novel or short story? Another way of framing this challenge is to ask what thing, concept, person, experience, observation, idea, dream, situation, or event intrigues your soul and inspires you enough to write. The operative phrase here is: it intrigues your soul and inspires. The internet provides a plethora of ideas on the topic of finding something that you want to write about, but many are mechanical or impersonal approaches. For example, one site offers 365 story ideas (elsewhere called “story prompts”) which puts the aspiring writer in touch with characters in hypothetical situations. Here is an example:
A lonely man finds a hand-written diary in a dingy bookstore in Paris and falls in love with the female diarist who is probably long-dead.
Now this example might intrigue your soul and inspire you. All well and good. But I would suspect that while most of us would find it to be an intriguing idea, I question whether it will touch your soul and inspire unless, perhaps you actually knew of such a person. If so, you would be more prone to investing further, because the story is closer to you and your soul—not just because it is a good idea for a story. My point is that unless you connect emotionally to the story idea, it will be just that—someone else’s story prompt.
I have a suggestion. Keep a notebook or file on things, concepts, persons, experiences, observations, ideas, dreams, situations, or events that intrigue your soul and impact you at a personal level. These will become the personal story prompts that you can use when you are ready. Here is a personal example.
My novel Laguna Diary started from something I saw while taking a long walk on the beach during a driving rainstorm. Inside a sea cave carved into a sandstone cliff was the rusted out chassis of an old 1950’s car. The cave was only opened a few times a year when rainstorms would carve out the sand inside. This unusually stormy day left the chassis fully exposed. How did it get there, I asked? Was it pushed off the 100 foot cliff or did someone drive it off by accident or on purpose? Were the driver’s bones still in and around the car on the day I stumbled into it? When I took the next step of touching the rusted surface of the frame, I was hooked. It became my story to tell.
I keep a file of just such accidental encounters and ideas in a file on my computer. The brain works in mysterious ways, and one needs to capture these precious ideas as they are revealed. After all, these will become your story prompts.
How do they get into my file? In the past, I wrote them down on a piece of paper. If it was a dream, I would get up and jot it down even in the dead of night and then review it again in the morning. If it passed the morning test, it went into the file as a text document. Today I send myself a text message with an idea, test it after a day or so, and enter it into the file if it feels right. Today I don’t struggle with ideas for my writing. I only struggle with the time to write. To make this objectively clear, here is my actual file path:
C:\Desktop\Writing\AAA WRITINGS\PROSE\Story Sketches & Backgrounds\Story Ideas
I hope this tip helps with your quest for meaningful story ideas for your fictional prose. Stay tuned for another post on the same topic involving Poetry versus Prose and the idea of a getting out of the way of your muse.