You’ve been staring a blinking cursor for an hour and the print on your ‘delete’ key is starting to rub off. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Your NaNoWriMo doesn’t have to wait because you can’t think of the perfect idea.
Writing is an art form we can use to express a story, but stories are born in lived experiences, our imaginations, and even the idle moments in our day-to-days. We’ve put together 5 ways you can find your story, even when it feels like you’ll never think of something worth writing.
1. Doodle a scene
Artists sketch. Often they’ll just get the shape of an idea down on paper to revisit later without giving it much thought. We can do that with words too! Take this: Two people arguing in a supermarket car park over an unreturned cart. As I’m putting myself into this situation, I start asking myself questions. Why didn’t she return the cart? Well, she has her kid in the car and didn’t want to leave them alone. Her partner is in the hospital, the ice cream is melting, and this was just one extra task that put her over.
See how I did that? I didn’t try to give her a complex background or have an inciting incident pushing the plot forwards, that can all come later. Sketching a scene like this, even if you throw it in the trash in five minutes, can start your ideas flowing. Who knows, you might go on to write a tragedy as she copes with everything happening, a murder not-so mystery as she snaps, or a sci-fi page-turner where she develops time travel powers and the whole convo didn’t happen in the first place. The important thing is to start writing; you can shape and define your ideas later.
2. Be “unoriginal”
I’m giving you permission right now. There’s a lot of pressure to arrive with something nobody has done before. Given roughly 8 billion people are living on our blue marble living largely similar lives, any attempt at being original is a fool’s errand. Love and murder are as old as humanity after all.
What’s yours to find is the specificity. What makes your story interesting? The particular way a family avoids talking about a certain subject. The street with too many trash cans. The shift in someone’s gait as they run into their ex. Writing what you know, informed by your own experiences, enriches the world with a story from a perspective we may never have seen before.
3. Explore fan fiction
Did you know Anna Todd’s After started as One Direction fan fic? Or that Fifty Shades of Grey started in Twilight fandom? Writing with characters you already love and have lived with takes a lot of mental load off as you’re starting out. By dipping into a world you’re comfortable with, you can concentrate on refining your fundamentals.
Of course these worlds belong to the original author, and you won’t be able to sell what you put together. But the habits remain. The story patterns you learn, the turn of phrase that has you chuckling, or even just the endurance you build to write every day. That all stays and opens the door that much wider for your next story.
4. Ask “What happened yesterday?”
Our stories always start in tension. It’s the inciting incident that pushes the stone down the hill where all the momentum of your story comes from. But what happened yesterday? Just a boring day when nothing much happened. Or was that tension slowly building already? Whispered about on the TV news.
Shifting the start point of your story, even if it won’t make it into your finished novel, can give you a unique perspective on what comes next. I like to do this through mixed media. I’ll write a newspaper article from the voice of someone living in my world. It’s almost like active mind mapping, where you’re planning out your connections without having to worry about how you’ll allude to it in prose.
5. Start with a person, not a plot
Your life is already full of vibrant characters you can learn from. That one uncle who keeps talking to you at family gatherings you can’t seem to escape. Your teacher with the bags under her eyes yet always has a smile on her face. The callouses on your dad’s hands as he tucked you in at night as a kid. We are all stories in motion and your task as a writer is to capture a small part of that.
I’ll often try to get outside the story I’m trying to write, and instead just spend some time with my character and get to know them better.
- What’s in your character’s pockets right now?
- Do they stand in the corner at parties? Or are they the life of it?
- Why are they in the dead-end job we find them in at the start of your story? What’s stopping their dreams becoming real?
You don’t even need to write to get to know them. When the ideas are really not flowing, try to meet them somewhere you can still be creative but without the pressure.
- Spend 20 minutes on Spotify creating a playlist they’d chill out to.
- Go for a walk and look for 3 things they’d think are cool.
- Go to a coffee shop and order what they’d pick and not what you’d pick.