You take a mundane situation that you’re in, and you change one detail and see where that leaves you.

For example I’m on my way to get my car, it’s heaving down with rain and I’m stuck on the bus with the surliest bus driver known to man.

To make a story out of this all I have to do is add the “what if” element to the story.

What if the driver is possessed by a demon (at this point I wouldn’t be surprised)?

What if the bus is able to move through other dimensions and the driver’s touchy because he knows he’s taken a wrong turn somewhere. What if I don’t notice until I pick up my car.

If one detail doesn’t do it, try changing two and then asking the next question “what then?”

How do you create stories when you’re stuck?

 The short answer is: They won’t leave me alone.*

 The long answer is that they tend to be hybrids of two other ideas. Or a hybrid of an idea and something random I’ve heard about from somewhere else.

 For example zombie stories are a dime a dozen these days, I still love them, but you can’t throw a stone without it hitting someone writing zombie fiction these days, so to make it fresh, it needs to be combined with something else. I also love science fiction, so put the two together and you get…

 Zombies in space!

 Okay, so that one needs some work, but the point is that practically any two subjects can be combined to make something new. The movie from Dusk Till Dawn successfully combined road trip/crime movie with vampires**. The Matrix did Sci- Fi and the TV series Firefly combined space opera with cowboy western.

 This can also work if you take a regular news item and combine it with a piece from the weird news section of the newspaper. For instance a regular news item about power cuts could be combined with a weird news item that declares that aliens slumber beneath the earth plotting our doom.

 Do you use combinations to get your ideas? Or do you have another way of cooking up a story?

 Let me know in the comments.

 *Incidentally, if you ever want to be left alone in an elevator, start banging your head on the wall and screaming for the voices to leave you alone.

** I liked it. Judge me if you must.

I think any writer, published or unpublished, gets asked this at least once a week. To people who don’t write it’s the irresistible question…well, that and “why do you do this to yourself?”

Maybe that’s just me.

The truth for most of us is that we don’t know where we get our ideas, and we scramble for a answer that sounds good enough to make the asker go away. We then spend the rest of the day wondering “where do I get my ideas?”

Just a few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me a slightly different question, she didn’t care where I got my ideas from, she wanted to know what it felt like when an idea popped into my head. I gave her the only answer I had:

It’s like being mugged.

I can be walking around minding my own business and an idea will creep up on me and smack me over the head. I usually have about a minute to write it down before something else grabs my attention and its lost forever, but during that minute the idea holds my full attention. So far I’ve been lucky and haven’t had a book idea while defusing a bomb, but I figure it’s only a matter of time.

It’s actually a far better question than “where do you get your ideas?” because no matter where my ideas come from, its not going to be the same for anyone else, because my life experiences are different. Finding out how an idea feels means that you can imagine that feeling in your own mind and see if that helps you find your own ideas for a book*.

What does it feel like when you get an idea? Do it creep up on you with a cosh, or does it knock politely?

* This is a technique called modeling that I picked up from NLP