Senin, 19 November 2012

Where to Find Creative Writing Ideas

Tips for generating creative writing ideas

  • Keep a journal - Record your observations, things that happen to you and how they feel, stories you hear from your friends, curious events on the news, gossip, memories. Any of these can become the seed of a story, novel, or poem. And you can go back to your journal as you're writing to find the details and descriptions that will make your scenes seem real.
  • Eavesdrop - I know it's rude... but only if you get caught. Listen to conversations on the bus, at the coffeehouse or the supermarket. You'll catch fragments of people's lives that you can use in your creative writing. Imagine what each person speaking is actually thinking. Imagine what happened to cause the conversation and what might happen next.
  • People-watch - Writers tend to be interested in other people's lives. (This is a nice way of saying that writers are nosy.) So watch the couple at the restaurant table next to you and imagine their story. Is it a first date? Is one of them bored with the other one? Can you hear what they're talking about? How could you describe their appearance, their body language, their voices, and what do these details say about them? All of this is a gold mine of creative writing material. So put on your dark glasses and go sit in a crowded place.
  • Pick a name from the phone book - Picture a woman named Gertrude. Now picture a woman named Jen, a woman named Shoshana. Chances are, each of these names inspired a very different mental image. Names call up a complex set of associations, and you can use them as the starting point for a fictional character. Then invent a problem for the character, and you have the beginning of a plot. What about a Shoshana trapped inside the body and life of a Gertrude, or vice-versa?
  • Watch the news - In addition to your own life and the lives of people you know, the news is an endless source of creative writing ideas. Take a local news story and imagine the event from the point of view of one of the people who was involved. What would he or she have felt? Imagine the event as a scene -- what would have been the sights, sounds, smells, sensations? What would have happened next? The children's book writer Linda Leopold Strauss got the idea for her novel Really, Truly, Everything's Fine from newspaper story about a man in her neighborhood who was accused of a white-collar crime. The story made her wonder if the man had a family, what conversation they would be having over their breakfast table that morning when the newspaper story came out, how the man's child might react to the news of her father's crime, how this would change her life. And so a novel was born.
  • Re-imagine a real event - Start with something that happened to you, or someone you know, or someone in a news story, and ask yourself "What if..." What if your untalented friend had tried to pursue his dream of becoming a jazz musician. What if instead of getting a divorce, you had poisoned your husband's coffee? Create an interesting situation, imagine how it would play out it as realistically as you can, and then start writing.
  • Use story starters - Creative Writing Now has a huge variety of story starters and fiction writing prompts that you can use to get creative writing ideas. Also check out Bryan Cohen's new e-book, 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts, which offers one thousand story starters covering a wide range of topics.

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