3 Underrated Ways to Generate Story Ideas

I’m often asked how I come up with ideas for stories. Do they come to me in my dreams?

No. But wouldn’t that be nice! I could stop stressing, relax, and just let it come to me. Unfortunately, the muses never seem to stop at my pillow.

And it’s really hard to just pull an idea out of thin air.

Fortunately, I have a couple of methods that work well enough to keep me busy.

Many of my colleagues use magazines. Or at least we used to. Now we have to go online and find the equivalent. We try to find articles about things in the zeitgeist.

For example, a few years ago I was writing on a show called, Tacoma FD. The showrunner noticed that more and more articles were covering this new sport called pickleball. (Today, everyone knows about pickleball. But this was when it was first taking off.)

My writing partner and I wound writing an episode where the gang at the fire department staged a pickleball tournament. Our characters learned about pickleball at the same time as the audience, which made it fun.

Back when I was a writer on Just Shoot Me, we did something similar. Word-of-the-Day calendars were becoming very popular, so we wrote a storyline where Nina buys a word-of-the-day calendar and awkwardly introduced new words into conversations in order to sound smart.