The Idea Center

Story ideas. So where do you get them? I find them in all sorts of odd places. In the comments section of the last post, I noted that I got the idea for that story from a blog post about Poe. Thinking about "The Tell-Tale Heart" and trying to write something similar but different.

Was it easy? No. The first draft had the house as the monster stealing hearts to beat inside the walls. And then I asked the all important writer question, "Why?" When Natalie showed up as the one stealing hearts the whole story took on a different meaning. Yes, the heart still beat inside the house, but the story was no longer about guilt, but love.

Ideas are all around us, we just have to look for them. I belonged to a flash writing group at one time that had over a hundred members all writing to the same prompt. In order for a writer's story to be different from the others, you had to discard the first three or four ideas that popped into your mind because you knew these were the same ideas everyone else was considering. It made you look at different aspects of a theme, then forced you to consider something totally off the beaten path.

Aside from prompts, there's the world around you. I saw a purple running jacket discarded on the side of the road once. For some reason, that jacket bothered me and I began to write. The story wasn't about a lost jacket, but about a woman who was fed up with her life, secretly lost weight, dyed her hair, and rode a bicycle out of town while everyone was looking for her. Believing her to be lost or kidnapped because they found her purple jacket on the side of the road.

There are story ideas everywhere, you just have to leave yourself open to the possibilities.

A perfect example of slipping off the beaten path is Kyle Minor's story "They Take You" found in the current issue of Plots with Guns
http://www.plotswithguns.com/3Minor.htm

Another is an older story that I came across by Stanley Ellin entitled "The Payoff". Well worth tracking down. I found it in the anthology "Great Stories of Suspense" edited by Ross Macdonald.