Story Ideas | Creative Writing Exercises, Tips & Advice | Writer's Inspiration, Productivity & Tools

Creative Writing Exercises & Prompts

By Deb Gallardo

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Today I have two quickie resources to stimulate your creative mind.

Stick figure pictures on this page, and in a downloadable pdf, can inspire your creativity, and there are even spaces to draw your own stick figure pictures.
Go to Write the Story (opens in new window)

The other resource is a “push-button” prompt to stimulate your imagination.
Go to Imagination Prompt (opens in new window)

For previous articles with links to writing prompts, writing resources and creative writing exercises, go here, here, here and here.

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Story Ideas - James Bond Encore

By Deb Gallardo

Another video about the James Bond novel.

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Story Ideas - Beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy

By Deb Gallardo

Part Three

In the first article in this series, I mentioned Bloom’s Taxonomy without going into detail, instead taking a piece of it and talking about how we need to make story ideas our own.

In the second article, I summarized Bloom’s Taxonomy, which describes how we process and use information from a basic to an advanced level. Then I applied this taxonomy, in part, to finding story ideas. I used the example of the movie “Star Wars - Episode Four,” the first film made in the Star Wars franchise. Here is the summary I used in that post:

A young man, stuck on an arid planet, dreams of getting off-planet and becoming a Jedi Knight. He gets his wish, but not in the way he’d hoped, when his home and relatives are destroyed. Impatient to become a knight without completing the normal years of study with a master, he becomes embroiled in an interstellar war against the evil Empire. Then a family secret is revealed as he learns the father he thought dead is not only alive, but has gone to the dark side.

Now What?

Since we are trying to come up with unique stories, we are not interested in much detail. Rather, we want the barest possible story skeleton — in fact, the more generic our storyline, the better. To illustrate how to take one synopsis and turn it into several stories, we first need to simplify the Star Wars synopsis above, then apply Who, What, When, Where, How and Why to it.

I recommend opening up your word processing or spreadsheet program so you can manipulate the information easier. But a handy pad and pen will also work if that’s your medium of choice.

Here is my simplified synopsis. Notice how taking out specific details has made the summary less noticeably “Star Wars-ish.”

Young man trains to be a knight when war comes to his land, and in the process he discovers a dark side to his family history and the father he never knew.

I’ve described how this works before, but we’ll go over it again. After you put the synopsis at the top, make two column headings below that - Original and New. Now down the left side list the six story components. It should look something like this:

Original
Who - Young man
What - Trains to be a knight
When- A long, long time ago
Where - In a distant galaxy
How - By studying with a master
Why - To combat an evil empire

The last step is the fun part. Substitute people, places, etc. under the “New” column. There are no wrong answers except one - you must not keep any element from the original, not even one that is thinly-disguised. In fact, you should add one more element: genre.

Here is my new story idea:
New
Who - Middle-aged woman
What - Goes back to music school
When - Modern Day
Where - Cleveland
How - Walking away from a lucrative business
Why - To save her sanity and follow her passion
Genre - Romantic suspense

There. You now have the spark of an idea for a new story. It will read something like this:

Middle-aged woman goes back to music school in Cleveland, walking away from a lucrative business to save her sanity and follow her passion.

Create as many “New” synopses as you can think of, by varying the story elements.This is where using a spreadsheet can come in handy. Make a list of protagonists for Who, a list of situations for What, a list of time periods for When, a list of locales (can be cities, countries, planets, can be buildings, submarines, space ships/space stations, can be a parallel universe or inside the human body) for Where, a list of methods, tactics, and strategies for How, a list of reasons for the story’s action for Why and a list of possible Genres and/or hybrid genres.

You could even create a deck of cards with one item on each, then draw one card at random for every element, to come up with a scenario.

When you run out of ideas, think of more movies or novels, then create generic synopses for each of them. Or “cheat” by using movie summaries from a TV listing publication. If all six elements are not present in any of these summaries, when you brainstorm a new scenario, add whatever elements you need.

It goes without saying that this isn’t the last step in the process, but if you don’t find a story spark, you can’t take the next step in the story-writing process. That, however, is an article for another day.