Story Ideas – Bloom’s Taxonomy for Writers

« Writing Resources – Thursday Next Series | BLOG HOME | Story Ideas from the World Around Us »

Story Ideas – Bloom’s Taxonomy for Writers

By Deb Gallardo

Part Two

In the last post on this topic, I said that the trouble with story ideas is in making them our own. That’s where Bloom’s Taxonomy comes in. What Bloom says, in a nutshell, is this:

As we progress in our understanding of new information, we go from

Knowledge – rote learning, to
Comprehension – being able to translate or restate, to
Application – evaluating and applying the information, to
Analysis – differentiating individual concepts into their component parts, to
Synthesis -putting all the pieces together into new forms, and finally to
Evaluation – discriminating, making judgments, justifying choices and decisions

How this might apply to writing

The principles of finding and evaluating a story idea may not have a one-to-one correlation with each element of Bloom’s Taxonomy, at least in this blog post. You, however, may find applicability to each of Bloom’s categories, especially if your mind works differently than mine (and thank goodness we don’t all think alike!). But even if we have to combine some of Bloom’s categories, we see a clearer picture of the story inspiration process.

Once you know what to look for, there are infinite places to find story ideas, as you’ve learned in the pages of this blog. Classified ads, headlines, nightly news stories, movie summaries, bestselling novels, daytime dramas (AKA “soaps”), song titles or lyrics, inspiring excerpts from poetry, fiction and non-fiction, a sudden trick of light, dreams, our own journals, obituaries, and phrases out of context — these barely scratch the surface of where story ideas are lurking.

Let’s use an easy example. We’ll take an already-established story idea from a blockbuster movie. Then step-by-step we’ll mix things up and make it our own.

When “Star Wars” came out circa 1977, movie viewers were surprised to learn that the film was Episode 4 of a greater saga which now comprises 7 movies. Here’s a possible summary for “Star Wars – Episode 4″:

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.

For a summary, this is fairly detailed, but it does tell all the essentials elements: Who, What, When, Where, How and Why. Ideally, condensing a summary to one sentence keeps the plot generic. The more detail, the more likely we are to find ourselves locked into the Star Wars plot instead of coming up with our own.

In the next installment, we’ll take this summary and construct several different story ideas.