If you have other things in your life – family, friends, good productive day work – these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer. David Brin

People are always asking where I get my ideas for stories as if, perhaps, the alchemical process is easy to wrestle into words.  I try to explain that ideas sometimes pop into my head when I least expect it, like mushrooms in a lawn; other times they sneak up on me, troubling at my consciousness until I spend a little time figuring out what exactly I’m planning to write.  Some ideas go the distance and turn into long stories or novels, others peter out leaving me with half finished narratives and tears of irritation.  When an idea seems so perfect that it has to be written down but comes to nothing on the page is when I feel worst as a writer, even worse than when I get rejection letters or unkind reviews (more about those in a later post!) 

But there are some places which I find are gold mines for ideas and so here are my top four for you to get inspired and get writing. 

1- Listen to conversations people are having around you.  Snippets of overheard dialogue can send your imagination on a terrific journey.

2- As yourself WHAT IF?  What if the sun didn’t come up tomorrow, what if your boss fired you in five minutes, what if you could fly?  What if is a key question for a writer, making you rethink your world and the world of your characters.

3- Think about the angle you need to tell your story from: by chosing the right perspective and the right opening you can discover new ideas and ways of looking at something that might have seemed too tired or boring before.

4- Read.  Read.  Read.  I could say this all day.  Books are like art galleries for aspiring (and established) writers, giving a space for the imagination to view and discover new work.  I don’t mean for you to copy what you’re reading, but I do mean let it inspire you and inform your dreams. 

Use this sentence to inspire a short story or a personal essay:

Nothing was left.

Adair Lara’s new book, Naked, Drunk and Writing is full of advice on how to write a personal essay or memoir. Two paragraphs in the opening of her essay What’s Your Angle? give a taste of her writing style and make me want to stop what I’m doing and craft an essay of my own:

Adair Lara: You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.

An angle is a way to tell a story. It is to the essay what a premise is to a book, or a handle is to advertising, or a high concept is to a movie (dinosaurs brought back to life for a theme park!). It’s a gimmick or twist or conceit that grabs the reader’s attention long enough for you to say what you want to say. Think of the angle as the Christmas tree. Once you have that six-foot pine standing up next to the piano, it’s pretty easy to see where the decorations go. Without the tree, what have you got? A lot of pretty balls on the floor.

You can read the rest here.