Generating story ideas is a lot of fun! You let your imagination loose to create characters, twists, strange things, things that bug you or make you happy, or anything else that crosses your mind.
One of the ways to create a lot of story ideas is to create interesting characters, then place them in a strange situation. To start creating your character, first think of what you’d like as a basis. Is it a person? Is it yourself? Is it an animal? A space creature? A fantasy character like a unicorn or dragon or elf? An Old West cowboy or a dashing prince or a beautiful fairy or a princess or a talking tree?
The more ideas you can create, the better! Let your mind wander into every area you can think of, taking a quick note for each one and moving on to another. You don’t want to spend any time AT ALL deciding whether it’s a good character or if it’s real or if you would really write a story using the character. You need ideas, lots and lots of ideas, and for your creativity to go wild without any filter.
Once you have a long list of characters, start thinking of interesting settings. You don’t need to connect the characters to the settings. You just want to have a bunch of interesting places. A medieval castle is always good, as is an Old West town, a dark forest, a bright sunny beach, a distant world where the colors are different and weird buildings exist, a house that creaks, a library, a park. Any place that you can imagine can be a great place for your story to take place. Write as many down as you can think of, as quickly as you can.
Now comes the fun part. Take each of your characters and match them up with several places. You don’t want to limit yourself to the common places. Sure, a knight and a dragon could be battling at a castle. The knight and dragon could also be at your local park – wouldn’t that be strange and interesting. A fairy could be talking to people or just a single person on a beach as well as a forest, or even the library. You’re looking for interesting matchups so your story is going to be instantly interesting. Make matches between as many characters and as many places as you can.
After you’ve made a list of all the matches, it’s possible you’ll still write a story with a traditional character in a traditional setting. Even if you choose this story idea, though, your imagination will be engaged and you’ll be able to write a more creative story.
If you think of anything crazy while your creating characters or settings, write that down! You don’t have to go in any order, and you certainly don’t want to throw out an idea just because it comes out of order. Creativity is messy. It doesn’t always like everything proper and in its place; if fact, creativity usually shuts down when you have rules. Write down any and all ideas you have as soon as you have them, then jump back to whatever you’re doing.
What you want when you’re finished is a whole long list of stories that sound interesting TO YOU. If you’re interested, don’t worry if anyone else would be interested. Sometimes, people will like the same story ideas that you like. Sometimes, they won’t. People are different and they have different likes and dislikes. As long as you write stories that you like, eventually you’ll find other people who also like your stories.
Remember this exercise. Don’t throw away your notes when you finish. You may use them for future stories. You’ll also want to do this activity in the future to come up with new story ideas or to jumpstart your creativity. Generating a lot of story ideas is fun. The ideas themselves are always going to be helpful because you’re going to be able to write stories for the rest of your life.