by Dave Haslett
Who are they running away from?
What jobs do they do?
What are their lives like?
What hobbies do they have?
What are the biggest problems in their lives?
What’s the most interesting thing about them?
Here’s an interesting exercise. Go up to several people and ask them all the same question. You’ll need a question that requires them to think of an answer, rather than giving a simple “yes”, “no”, or “quarter past two”. Watch how they react as they think about their answer. It doesn’t matter what the question is, as you’re interested in their reaction not their answer.
Do they answer immediately? Or do they scratch themselves in various places, look around for clues, panic, or stare at you blankly? Do they walk away without answering? When they finally give an answer, how do they say it? Are they confident, hesitant, nervous, or friendly? Was their answer correct? Or did they make something up just to get rid of you? What sort of accent do they have? What does that say about them, their backgrounds, their jobs and habits and so on?
This exercise only takes a few minutes, but you’ll come across people with all sorts of peculiar quirks. They’ll make fantastic characters for your books.
Not too long ago I went to collect someone from a big event. While I was waiting for her to come out, I sat in my car and pretended to look at something on my phone. But I was actually watching the people leaving the venue. Here are some of the more interesting people I saw:
A woman shaped exactly like a balloon.
A wiry looking girl with a huge backside and tree trunk legs.
A massive woman in a wheelchair who pushed herself along with sticks, cigarette clamped firmly in her mouth.
A very thin man who bent in the middle.
A guy with a massive beer gut and trousers that squeezed under it so tightly that I wondered how he got into them – it looked extremely uncomfortable.
A nasty looking guy with tattoos and beard, hand-in-hand with a well-dressed little girl that he obviously took good care of and who seemed to think the world of him.
A pretty girl who smiled at me as she passed by – but she had the biggest teeth you’ve ever seen!
A mother with her young daughters who had dyed hair, piercings and cropped clothing that revealed everything. Why did she let them do it? Don’t they get into trouble at school for looking like that?
That’s eight interesting characters I can use in a story, all in the space of ten minutes. Now I just need to give them names and think about what they might get up to if I put them together. Perhaps they’ll need to cooperate to solve a crime. Which one is the villain? Who’s the victim? Who falls in love with whom? There’s plenty of fun to be had here.
You could take the same approach with the people you know. Who would make a great villain, victim, action hero, love interest, and so on? You could base your characters and stories on them.
Photographs
Dig out your old photographs, or browse through the collection on your computer. Have a good look at all the things happening in the background that you might not have noticed before.
Perhaps someone strayed into the shot. Perhaps there’s an event going on, or there are people just going about their business. Does anything catch your eye? Look for things that take you by surprise, then think about how you could make a story out of it.
Why did you – or someone else – take the photo? What if someone in the background was committing a crime but you didn’t realise it until now? What if the wrong person was convicted for that crime, and this photo proves he didn’t do it?
If you don’t have many photos, you’ll find millions of them online. Try a photo-sharing website such as:
Instagram
Pinterest
Flickr
Pixabay
Or a stock image site such as:
Shutterstock
Unsplash
iStock
Pexels
Canva
Search for things like “street scene” or “park with people” or “crowd” or “shopping mall” or “city people” or anything else you can think of that might lead you to an intriguing shot.
Pre-owned belongings
Have a poke around a junk shop and see what curiosities you can find. Look for strange or interesting items and those that show some history. Hold each item in your hands and examine it closely.
What is it? What was it used for? What else might it have been used for? Who might have owned it? How did he get it? What happened to him? How did it end up here?
Look for signs of damage. How might it have happened? Has the damage affected its value?
You could also try searching charity shops, thrift stores, jumble sales, car boot sales, garage sales, yard sales, antique stalls, recycling centres, auctions, and so on.
Problem pages and true-life articles
You’ll find these in magazines aimed at women and teenage girls, and they’re a great place to look for ideas. You might read about a failed relationship, abuse, a child who went missing years ago and then turned up again, and all sorts of other things. You can turn these real-life stories into novels, or explore them in greater depth in non-fiction books. You could put together a collection of similar or related cases. You might also like to include some strategies for overcoming the problem, preventing it from happening again, and so on.
As you read the articles, you’ll learn about the areas of life that people have the most difficulties with. Similar problems crop up again and again.
Look at the advice given in the magazines. Do you think it would work? Or do you think it wouldn’t work? Can you see a story developing out of the problem and the advice that was given? Can you think of some better advice? Why do you think the same problems keep recurring? What do you think can be done about it?
What if an agony aunt deliberately gave her readers misleading advice? Why would she do that? Is someone paying her or giving her some other incentive? Is she being blackmailed?
How about writing a story about a roving agony aunt who fills in when the regular agony aunts are on holiday? She never knows from one week to the next what sort of people and problems she might be faced with. She’ll need to adapt quickly and have a broad knowledge of all sorts of subjects. But she can’t possibly know everything, and she’ll probably make a few mistakes. Some of her advice might not be as good as it first appears. What might happen then?
Quotations and proverbs
Writing contests often use quotations and proverbs as starting points for stories. You needn’t restrict yourself to entering contests though. Find a book of quotations, proverbs or phrases and pick a few that appeal to you. What stories do they suggest? What characters come to mind?
The first few ideas that occur to you will probably be the same ones that occur to everyone else. In fact, there’s a good chance those stories have been written already. So think about other stories, and make a list. Choose the tenth idea on your list – or any idea after the tenth that looks particularly interesting.
Reality/human interest TV shows
TV shows that cover personal and legal issues are enormously popular, and they can quickly produce hundreds of great ideas. Think of shows such as The Jeremy Kyle Show, The Jerry Springer Show, Judge Judy, or Judge Rinder. They’re terrific sources of ideas for human interest stories, and feature problems that real people are struggling to overcome, as well as personal tragedies, secrets and lies, and so on.
If one of the stories interests you, try writing to the people concerned, asking them to get in touch with you. Ask if you can write about their story or help them with their problem. If you send your letter to the show’s producers or production company, they’ll usually forward it on for you.
Or you could use the people and their stories as a starting point for your own characters and plots. Change their names, descriptions and situations. Or research the issue further and write a guidebook that aims to h
elp people in similar positions.
Running and jogging
As well as being good for you, your mind tends to wander after a while and ideas form – usually during the second half of your run in my experience. The constant pounding can also be useful if you’re looking to add a sense of rhythm to your writing.
I’ve found I can only remember two ideas at a time, so I always carry something with me to record them. As a last resort, you could repeat your two ideas over and over in your head until you get home. You’ll remember them, but it’ll prevent you from having any more ideas. It’s much better to record them in some way if you can, so you can keep your mind clear and receptive to more ideas.
Slips of the tongue
We all make slips of the tongue now and again. They’re natural, and they demonstrate how passionate we are about what we’re saying – we’re so caught up in the subject that we fall over ourselves trying to get it all out. But slips of the tongue can also be a fantastic source of ideas. Whenever you make a mistake, or when someone else does, be sure to write it down.
It’s great fun to look through your collection of slip-ups from time to time. What do they suggest to you? Story ideas? Interesting characters? Witty dialogue? Short scenes?
Television
Flick through four or five TV channels, spending no more than a second or so on each one. Make a note of the image that’s being shown. If you can tell what’s going on, make a note of that too. Then try forming some sort of connection between them.
This is what happened when I tried it here in the UK:
BBC1: anti-war protesters cycling through London wearing skull masks.
BBC2: an extreme close-up of a black man singing while the credits scroll up over his face.
ITV1: frozen meat defrosting because bad weather brought down power lines.
C4: teenagers tell ghost stories in a haunted house where they’re spending the night for a bet.
I can see some terrific ideas for a story there – and it took almost no effort. Give it a try. You can repeat the process every few minutes to generate a new set of images. And, depending on your TV subscription package, you might have dozens or even hundreds of channels to choose from.
The invisible writer
Imagine you’re invisible. You can go anywhere and do anything, and no one can see you. Where will you go? What goes on behind closed doors? What do people get up to when they think no one is watching or listening? Here’s your chance to find out – in your imagination at least.
If your neighbours are having an argument, you could slip in unnoticed and listen. Why are they arguing?
Maybe you suspect a gang of crooks is planning something. You could listen in and find out what they’re up to. Perhaps you could try to stop them.
Perhaps the intelligence services know you’re invisible and they want to recruit you as a spy. Will you agree to work for them?
If you wanted to “disappear” for a while so no one could find you, it would be easy. You could commit crimes and get away with them, or avoid conscription, and all sorts of other things.
You could play tricks on people by moving things around. Perhaps you could convince someone that their house is haunted – and then buy it for a discount. Or you could work on a TV show about ghost hunting, or be a magician’s assistant, or work for a spiritualist medium – who might become famous despite his lack of ability in that field.
Are you always invisible? Or are you sometimes visible? Can you control when you are and aren’t visible? How do you become invisible and how do you become visible again? If you’re always invisible, how did it happen? Will you always be invisible? If so, are you happy about it? Is there anything you could do to change it?
What other super-human skills might you have, and what might you be able to do or find out as a result?
Why might using that information not be as easy as you first thought? Think about how you might explain it in court, for example, without revealing that you have this superpower. What evidence would you be able to produce, and how would you explain how you got it? Why might you want your superpower to remain a secret, even from the police?
How about telling the story of a writer whose super-human power allows him to write books really quickly? That might be a good thing (at first) and he could make a lot of money. But why might it turn out to be a bad thing? Perhaps the endless marketing takes up more and more of his time, and he no longer has any time for himself and his family. The more books he writes, the more marketing he’s expected to do, and the more his life and relationships suffer. In the end, it might all become too much for him. How might he escape from it? He could just stop writing, of course. But what if writing is his life and he doesn’t want to do anything else? What else might happen to him? How could you turn this idea into an exciting adventure that everyone would want to read?
Typos and spelling mistakes
You’re more likely to make typing and spelling mistakes when you’re writing quickly. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’ll probably find some interesting and bizarre ideas when you edit your work. Whenever you spot something that needs correcting, pause for a second and consider the possibilities. You’ll sometimes see ideas that you would never have thought of otherwise.
Most word processors have built-in spelling checkers and they can produce interesting results, especially when they try to correct people’s names and place names.
Predictive text and autocorrect features on mobile phones can produce amusing and absurd ideas too. Whenever you need to make a correction, stop and think about whether your phone’s ridiculous suggestion might be something you could write about.
Uniqueness
Let’s say you’re writing about trees. Look at every tree you come across. What makes it unique? If you had to find the same tree again, perhaps years later, how could you be sure it was the same one?
Think about where it is and what it looks like. How could you describe it vividly, or in a new way, so that everyone else would recognise it too, and see it the same way as you do?
Walking
Go for a long walk by yourself, perhaps in the countryside or along a beach. Find somewhere quiet and secluded so you can think freely without distractions or interruptions. And – as always – take something with you to record your ideas.
It might take twenty to thirty minutes before the first ideas start to come. But by around the fifty-minute mark, I find they usually come in floods – often five or more at a time. I’ve sometimes returned from a long walk with over a hundred usable ideas.
It’s all about getting yourself into the right frame of mind. Once you’re properly tuned in, the ideas sometimes come as fast as you can write them down – and sometimes faster. But you need to be completely relaxed, forget about everything else, and not worry about whether you’ll get any ideas.
Once, during a three-hour walk along a canal tow path, I came up with the ideas for two new books and wrote their complete outlines. It’s a good thing there were plenty of benches along the path, as I had to keep stopping to write it all down.
I’ve found that I can generate even more ideas by listening to audio books or podcasts as I walk. I usually listen to podcasts about writing and selling books. As I’m concentrating on what’s being said, and thinking about how I can apply the ideas to my own books, it often triggers all sorts of unrelated ideas.
Podcasts are like radio shows, but you download them and play them on your smartphone or computer. An app on my phone automatically downloads new episodes of podcasts I’ve subscribed to, such as The Creative Penn and The Sell More Books Show.
Weird things happen
What are the strangest, weirdest, quirkiest, most bizarre things you’ve ever seen or had happen to you? Ask everyone you meet the same question: your friends, your family, your colleagues, your doctor, your dentist, or the stranger sitting next to you on the bus or train or at the cinema.
The world is a stranger place than you can
possibly imagine, and the people you talk to are your witnesses. Most of them will be delighted to tell you what they’ve seen and had happen to them. You’ll soon have a fantastic collection of ideas to inspire you and play around with.
You could also write a newspaper article or magazine feature that includes your best examples of how weird the world is.
How about inviting the publication’s readers to send in examples of their own? You could compile the best ones into a book, as we discussed in the previous chapter.
What if…?
Playing “what if…?” is one of the fastest and easiest ways to generate ideas for things to write about, even on days when your brain won’t work.
For example, you could think about: What if the sun didn’t come up tomorrow morning? You should be able to turn that simple idea into a long list of related questions, thoughts, problems, solutions, and so on. And then you could link them together and expand them to create a book.
In the next two chapters, we’ll look at some quick and easy ways to expand initial ideas into book-length projects.
Once you have your starting point, use more “what ifs” to create characters, background details and plot twists that make your story come alive and stand out – assuming you’re writing a novel.
If you’re writing a non-fiction book, you should be able to come up with lots of “what ifs” that explore the subject in depth, consider the problems with it, find potential solutions, and so on.