Generating Ideas for Novels, Blogs and Articles

Posted by Jen on Friday, December 14th, 2007 @ 5:07 pm

One of the most important parts of the writing process, whether you craft novels, articles or blogs, is generating ideas. It is not always easy coming up with great ideas, and it can be frustrating when nothing comes to mind.

I’m going to list the top six things that have worked for me when generating ideas. I have found these to be the most useful when trying to come up with a new idea for a story or blog entry.

1. Observation
This works well in a variety of ways. The observation of people, places and events can generate a multitude of ideas for your writing. The observation of people can give you an idea for a character in your novel. The observation of events can give you an idea for a news article or an opinion post.

Walking around the city, you might notice a popular Italian restaurant. Why not write a short story about the owners of an Italian restaurant? You could also turn this into an article on the best Italian restaurants in the city. Ideas are everywhere. You just need to keep an eye out and observe the world around you.

2. Newspapers, magazines, blogs, books and movies
These resources can create an abundance of ideas. The tricky part here is that you need to make sure that you are not copying someone else. It’s tempting to copy a successful blogger or novelist, but it is a recipe for disaster. Who wants to read a lesser copy of someone else?

Instead, look to these sources for inspiration. If a newspaper covers a crime story, you could use that as an inspiration for a mystery novel. If a blogger does a list post, much like this one, you could take one of the items on the list and expand on that.

3. Brainstorm Clouds
Brainstorm Clouds are fun. They also have the potential for creating great ideas.

I did my own Brainstorm Cloud today. I came up with six random words, and then spliced them all together into a story.

Words: Cookie, Safety Pin, Singer, Florida, Fly, Headset

Story Idea: My aim was to create a possible idea for a murder mystery. I came up with this: An aspiring singer-songwriter lives in Florida and has a day job at a safety pin company. She suspects something criminal is going on with the top management and decides she wants to be a fly-on-the-wall in the meeting across the hall. She unhooks the phone in the office across the hall before the meeting begins so she can listen in on her headset. She discovers that they plan to murder the CEO with a box of poisonous cookies from an anonymous admirer.

Now, it’s kind of silly, but it’s an idea. If I don’t like every detail of the story, I could shift some things around. It’s a great starting place, and I could even use it as a short story, just to get some practice in crafting mysteries.

4. Online Idea Generators
If the Brainstorm Could doesn’t work for you, there are online idea generators available. I touched on some of these in my “101 Resources for Writers and Bloggers” post. In case you missed those, here they are again:

Word Tools – This site has a random word generator. This could help you generate words for a Brainstorm Cloud.
Cure Writers Block – This site has a Character Name generator, a Random Line generator and more.
Story Idea Generator – This site actually generates random story ideas.
Right-Brained Prompts – Story starters, random prompts and more.

5. Music
Music is very inspirational. Songs are full of emotion and stories. In the current novel I’m writing, a song was the inspiration for my main character’s entire motivation in life. It plays a big part in who she is and how she reacts to situations. I suggest creating a playlist of some of your favorite songs and sitting back so you can really digest them. You could come up with a great idea this way.

6. What Would I Want to Read?
I find that I can quickly come up with an idea for a blog post if I just imagine what I would like to read. I’d like to read about comics so I have a weekly blog entry about the comics I get each week. I’d love to read a mystery that takes place in New York City so I am writing just that. It sounds so simple, but it works.

If you employ these methods above, I believe you can develop some great ideas for your novels, articles and blogs. There are many more methods for generating ideas that I have not listed here. What are yours?

Comments

By Mike Smith on December 16th, 2007 at 2:29 am

Great post
I found your website from skelliewag.org’s comments section. You’ve got some great articles here!

I like this one a lot because I’ve been using my whiteboard for putting down ideas in spiderwebs like this for blog posts. Definitely a great way to find something new to talk about.

By JenWriter on December 18th, 2007 at 11:26 pm

@ Mike: Thanks for stopping by! The whiteboard is a great idea. I like to have some visual to refer to when coming up with ideas. Also, don’t you love Skellie’s blog?