7 Easy Ways to Come Up with Story Ideas

A Guest Post by Lion El Aton

Sometimes coming up with new ideas for stories can be difficult. That’s why we created this list of 7 experiments you can try right now to make it so easy, you won’t know which idea to do first.

Be Inspired by Digital Art

Go to websites like ArtStation and Concept Art World and browse through the images. Go slowly. If anything catches your eye, stop, take it in, and imagine a story that would explain what’s going on in the image.

Once you have a rough idea for a story to go along with it, decide whether or not you like what you came up with. If you do, just elaborate on it and start writing it out.

If you don’t, just move on to the next image that catches your eye. You have access to a potentially endless supply of inspiration this way. Just make sure you don’t glaze over and find yourself scrolling past images without really giving them thought.

The Character Transplant

Take a rough outline of a character you like and make a similar character, but in a totally new setting or time.

What would a character like Sherlock Holmes be like if he were born in Ancient Rome? Write a story about a photojournalist in World War II. Take a serial killer like Hannibal and imagine what he would be like if he lived in the future. Or imagine a story about a vigilante if he lived in Ancient Egypt.

Start with your favorite characters and create new characters in different settings and times based off of them. After all, you probably have a reason why you love them, so they should be easier and more fun for you to write about.

If you start to run out of character types you can think of, TV Tropes has limitless pages explaining just about every character archetype there is. It’s basically an encyclopedia of every trope imaginable, and the films, TV and other media they’re used in, so it’s definitely a site you’ll want to bookmark.

The Genre Mashup

Combine two genres (or subgenres) you rarely see together and make a story in that universe. These unique combinations have consistently lent themselves to wildly original and inventive works.

For instance: sci-fi/western (Firefly), horror/fantasy (Pan’s Labyrinth) heist/sci-fi (Inception). These not-oft-seen combinations will help you to easily create something original by imagining settings and scenarios that are seldom depicted in other work.

If you want to get even crazier, you can mash everything up using this Story Idea Generator.

Embellish Your Own Life

Pick a great story from your own life and then exaggerate. You’ve probably had a lot of great or crazy experiences throughout your life. Write them.

Change anything you want to make it more interesting. Just be sure you don’t inadvertently make it into an unrealistic fantasy where only awesome stuff happens to your protagonist.

If you’re not interesting, don’t sweat it. You just have to know someone who’s interesting and have them tell you all their stories.

Use Your Dreams

Start writing down all of your dreams (and nightmares) the moment you wake up. Tons of amazing films, like The Terminator and Misery, are based on the dreams of their creators.

It’s basically an endless supply of pure creativity. You have multiple dreams every night, but most people don’t remember the large bulk of them.

Make an effort to start writing down all your dreams the instant you wake up in the morning. Just create notes in your phone (I use Evernote), or keep a pad of paper or a journal near your bedside if you prefer a more analog approach.

Try not to move when you wake up. Much of your dreams are forgotten simply in the process of moving around. Try to lie still, and then start recalling your dream in the present tense from beginning to end. This will make it easier to remember.

After a bit of practice, you’ll start getting to where you can remember multiple dreams every night. This will inevitably give you a ton of great material.

Watch History Shows

Watch shows like Mysteries at the Museum which are made up almost exclusively of incredible stories from throughout history, most of which have never been made into films.

Either base your stories on these true events (with as little or as much creative freedom as you like), or simply use aspects of them to create something new.

The Revenant is based on a true story about legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass, but the director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, gave him a fictional son to establish an emotional anchor for the film.

Try New Things

This sounds almost painfully obvious, but the more things you’re exposed to, the more things you have to draw from to come up with new ideas.

If you’ve never seen anime, watch anime. If you’ve never played certain types of video games, play those. Go to the opera. Read Shakespeare.

Find things that lots of people love that maybe you don’t think you’d be into and give them a try. Go where you don’t normally go and you’ll see things you don’t normally see.

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Lion El Aton is the founder of FILM CRUX, a blog created specifically to help filmmakers make better films.

His film work has been featured on Huffington Post, Mashable, TIME.com, VICE, and has millions of views for some reason.

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