How To Come Up With Story Ideas + Examples!

hey i'm hannah i'm a writer i have two published short story collections you can find the links to buy them in the description for those of you who write short stories is coming up with ideas for them the hardest part of the process or the easiest part let me know in a comment i get a lot of questions about story ideas so i thought i'd just make a video on it today i have six tips for how to come up with them and then i'm gonna go through both of my short story collections to tell you what the idea origins were for each of them i think hearing how writers come up with stories makes it easier for us to realize when we're having ideas if that makes sense anyway tip one go outside listen and watch observe the world and then write down the things that you like i've mentioned this a few times before but i have several documents on my phone one is for lines of dialogue either things that i hear people say or things i think of i have another for imagery so like stuff that i see or like sensory details that i really have a connection to for whatever reason i'll write those down and then i have a general one for story and character ideas so once you start keeping track of these things once you're ready to write you can just go into that document and fish out a prompt tip two is to use your life think of impactful moments or important people in your life and see if you can write a story from it it doesn't have to be direct non-fiction or anywhere close to what actually happened but like the most convincing lies are based on a kernel of truth so i think the best fiction is also based on some kind of truth it just makes the story more believable so you can use real things that happened in your life as prompts but i also like to interview people like you can ask a family member what their most distinct childhood memory is and then write a story on that so what you end up with can be as similar to or as different from the actual events as you'd like it to be but starting from a place of reality is a good way to generate ideas and it can make your story much more believable tip three is to read other short stories and see what you like about them this could be anything from lines characters the way they start a story the way they end a story knowing what you like and stories you read can help you to write better ones you can also take something from a story and use it as inspiration for your own for example you might read wolverine frogs and like the image that i used of um maya looking at that boy's dried brown blood on her fingertips mixing with her own fresh red blood and you might take that image as a prompt for your own story and end up with like a werewolf novel so keep your eyes open to things that appeal to you especially in other pieces of writing by the way if any of you write a werewolf novel with that prompt i do want to read it tip 4 use prompt lists you can google any category or genre of writing prompt and find thousands of them they're everywhere or you can use the link in my description to subscribe to my newsletter and get 50 free writing prompts tip 5 is my favorite write fan fiction of your own writing for example i could take the abusive mother from margrove and i could write from her perspective even though she's barely anything in the story as it is so we could set it in a different time so maybe it's right after her husband died she just had her second child so we get to see her grieving process and being a single mother and then watch her spiral into being an alcoholic that would be a completely different story but i've already built the world and i've already developed the characters so that could be a very quick shortcut to a new story or i could take her as a character and said it like in a present day story instead of in the 1800s so how would a person with that very same personality and those same strengths and weaknesses react to some specific event today so this tip kind of recycles characters and concepts you've already developed which is a great shortcut because it has that depth you've already put the time into it and it's just a great idea generator and tip six is to consume media in the genre that you want to write whenever i get to explaining my story ideas from starlight you're gonna see that i was listening to a lot of true crime podcasts so if you're writing horror you might watch a lot of horror films or listen to spooky story podcasts or read edgar allan poe or whatever media form that you enjoy in that genre should spark some ideas so now i'm gonna go over the stories in my collections and tell you exactly why i wrote each of them like what that very first idea was there might be a few spoilers that's why i'm doing both of them and i'm going to link the timestamps in the description for when i'm reading each in case you've only read one you can get some examples without spoilers or you can just go read them and then come back and watch this video everything's linked in the description let's start with little birds so for dear emma i just wanted to use the word goddamn in a story that's it for what remains i just have always had a fascination with roadkill so i kind of wanted to write a story with that dead animal imagery sorry and i read a book series when i was younger i think it was called the red rock mysteries but i remember seeing where one of the kids like sees a woman digging a hole at night and he like thinks she's doing something else so he investigates and realizes she's burying roadkill so i just gave that woman a motivation for why she was burying roadkill and that's how what remains happened by the window was just something that popped in my head which i think is how most micro fiction happens cave i saw a dead squirrel this really is the roadkill collection isn't it but i saw a dead squirrel and i thought it was really interesting that he was completely flattened and then a car would pass and his little tail would whip and i was like oh that's funny so i wrote that down that was in my imagery folder and this was actually a much longer piece where a character was like back in their hometown because their sibling had committed suicide and they were there for the funeral and it opened with them seeing the squirrels because they're like wow these squirrels are so connected and they know when each other needs help and all of this and i didn't even know that my sibling was going through whatever they were going through but then i just cut it down to the first scene and it became a microfiction he wrote me a song as pretty much non-fiction an envelope i wanted to write a story that wasn't sad so i made up this ridiculous character her name is lainey i can't stand her and then i just put her in a situation the situation was a breakup that's how that story happened crop stat is another one of the micro fictions and it's an edited line from my friend's travel journal because i read his journals because he's very funny and the story about this woman was great so crop means to gather and step means to like leave alone so it's a catch and release moment for making friends with this woman and then not being able to get rid of her and krobstead is an anagram for prescott and that's my friend's middle name so for winnow one of the opening images is the character pulling a blanket out of the dryer and like throwing it in the air on top of them and it settles and the lights filtering through the colors of the blanket and it's warm and this is like a very distinct memory i had from when i was five or six i was at my friend's house we took our lion king blanket out of the dryer and did the same thing so i just always had for some reason that experience in my head so i wrote it as a scene like i just described that and then the rest of the story kept going and there's a theme throughout it of every time this character's thinking of her ex it's warm like something in the room is warm and then as soon as that memory goes away it's cold again so that's where that came from ignorance was a line from one of my travel journals it's about this specific person and after i wrote it i just like thought about it every now and then so when i was writing micro fiction to sprinkle throughout little birds that one just made its way in wolverine frogs i read a tumblr post about wolverine frogs and that's how i learned about them and i immediately related it to like these certain experiences spoilers you can go read it though so that metaphor happened really really easily this was one of those stories that just like you start and then it just spills out and that's how this one was as soon as i read that post about wolverine frogs little birds i had the idea of a stalker sitting outside of someone's house and they think that they're watching them and then they realize that the person they've been stalking has left and then it's kind of like the feeling that they're left with after that green the prompt was green so i was president of the creative writing club in college and we would have these events where we had some kind of writing prompt people would write for that poems or stories or whatever and then we'd read them out loud at the event cane sprouts i wrote at a time of just like sad old people multiple grandparents were very sick and i was still working in home care so i was just surrounded by sad sad old people all day long and it was a big bummer and cane sprouts was kind of me trying to feel like that wasn't useless stuff for it like i just wanted to make something out of it so that's how that happened almost everything in it is non-fiction i just like pieced a bunch of stories together starlight was written much more intentionally because i knew the genre going into it sliced was actually a piece that i wrote before i published little birds and it just didn't fit into that collection so i saved it for this one i actually wrote starlight so that i could publish sliced in a book i was waiting in a doctor's office because i had driven my sibling there for an appointment and every time i'm in a hospital i'm like thinking about anatomy so i had the idea of someone who was born without a mouth so they cut their own because they want to fit in and then i thought about how that would obviously be very painful and also wouldn't work so it became a metaphor for like yeah you can mutilate yourself to fit in but it'll never be legitimate and you're not gonna stop bleeding ink was based on a dream i actually have a video where i wrote that from like jotting down the dream to the finished product if you want to watch that i'll link it in the description for the swamp witch i just wanted to write a fun story about some cranky old in a swamp i think that's the most self-indulgent story i've ever written she's just got a pet crow and she's a pothead and maybe she's a little bit of a cannibal so this story was just me having a good time it started like that and it ended like that and i'm glad i included it contained came from actually brainstormed like things i was scared of as a child and i remember being in my granny's house when i would sleep over and in that room there was a big ac receptacle and i would just stare at it for hours imagining what might come out so the prompt for that one was an undiagnosed anxiety disorder warm i think is really interesting seeing how people interpret it versus how i meant it so most people read it like the people i've seen talking about it and they see it as uh like a story about survivor's guilt or about self-blame kind of thing but the original idea i had for it was what if a serial killer realizes that they're into it because they accidentally kill someone in self-defense and they're like oh that was kind of fun so yeah i think the way that you all read that is a little more noble than the way that i meant it for margrove i was listening to a true crime podcast about these sisters in the 1800s and they ran a con one of them pretended to be a medium and one of them pretended to be like the spirit she summoned so i was like well what if they do that long term and the sister playing the spirit has to like hide away so that people in real life don't get suspicious about the act and then what if she kind of loses her mind and thinks that she is a spirit i actually have a much longer version of that story that i might flesh out and publish as a novella that focuses more on the medium sisters guilt afterward bruising also came from a true crime podcast so it was one about this woman who was kidnapped and tortured in a desert but she survived and the podcast was an interview with her and something she said is pretty similar to one of the lines of this story but it was when she was describing the kidnapper opening the trunk she was in and she was looking around at stuff and she said something like the whole world looked evil and i couldn't remember if it always had so i wrote this story from the perspective of an assault victim leaving a police station after making a report and she's like looking around at the sidewalk and stuff and everything is really violent and harsh and now she's living in a world that she feels like hates her and she's wondering how she never noticed it before for home i wanted to write a character who in adulthood has found like success and they're happy with themselves and where they are but then they return to their childhood home and like shrink back to who they were as a child in an abusive house i have a video writing that one too which i'll also link in the description if you want to see it mother is another one that i wrote in a video it might be the same video but it kind of came from the disney movie tangled i was thinking about if mother gothel just like kept coming to the window as rapunzel was growing and like befriended her before she kidnapped her and i don't know if there's a version of rapunzel where mother gothel is a crow but i've always thought about her as like a shapeshifter i think i may have just made that up so i wanted to write a little fairy tale type story of a crow that keeps visiting a little princess in her window as she grows and then like how their relationship would evolve and what it would mean starlet shadows came from a true crime documentary i don't even remember the whole story but there were several sisters who lived in like a rural farmhouse and the father was insane and i remember one part of it where one of the girls was like hiding a litter of kittens and he found them and stomped them to death so i just wrote that scene and then i wrote the rest of the story around it and i actually ended up cutting that scene in the second draft so it's really funny how sometimes the thing that you write the story for doesn't end up making it into the final draft uh for white rabbit i always wanted to read a story about like a lonely vampire and what they would do they adopt animals and they have a tender account is what i decided passing ghosts i just wanted to write a story from a ghost's perspective as they're like watching the people who live in the house they're stuck in change and grow and die while they cannot change or grow or die so i had that idea and i wrote passing ghosts all in one go pretty much exactly how it is so it's another story like wolverine frogs where it just all splats out that's all i've got for you i hope it was helpful thank you for watching and thank you to my patrons for sponsoring this video and supporting the channel why does that send it so hard for me to say it always is but i really appreciate you guys so don't forget to sign up for my newsletter so that you can get those 50 free writing prompts and i hope that you like them and if my stories sound interesting i would appreciate you picking up a copy and then maybe leaving a review or something i don't know all of the links are in the description i will see you next week bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Hannah Lee Kidder - Writer

Views: 67,069

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Id: f9fQR4eNp04

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021