Never Run Out of Story Ideas: A 4-Step System for Writers Who Can’t Wait for Inspiration

True or false: Sometimes there’s just nothing to write about.

Something I think about, talk about, and write about a lot is holding yourself accountable to actually doing creative work on a regular basis if the life you want for yourself is one that includes doing creative work.

Among those who choose creative work, many approach it sporadically. When inspiration strikes—and only then. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no reason that anyone has to produce creative work regularly if their reason for doing it is personal fulfilment. It’s the union of “I only work on my creative project when inspiration strikes” and “I would like to do this creative activity for a living” that is the problem.

Hold that thought, I’m coming back to it in three seconds. Let me tell you about my friend’s little brother, who used to come along to trivia with us when he was twelve and I was already an entire adult human. I recently found out that in the time between then and now, he too has become an entire adult human and has been making the music for a new video game that came out this summer.

I am not, myself, musically oriented. I don’t understand music or spend time thinking about it. FM-radio-while-driving is my maximum level of musical engagement. But when I got this game I made a point to listen to the music because my friend’s little brother made it. If you were in a band I’d listen to your album, too, although I might not be able to appreciate it properly.

This game has a ton of music. Every place I go has different music. Every shop has its own theme playing when you go in. The western forest has a different theme than the eastern forest. There’s a record shop you can go into—which has its own record-shop leitmotif playing in the background—and you can buy records of even more music to listen to in your game house.

I don’t actually know how someone just comes up with music, like with their brain. While I was playing this weekend, it had me thinking about the difference between being creative for fun, because creating stuff sometimes is enjoyable, and seeing a creative endeavor through. This guy did not slap together three or four tracks to score this game. This guy produced dozens and dozens of tracks.

If music-ing is like writing or any other creative thing that I know how to do, that is incredibly tough. Anyone can knock out a composition when inspiration is on their side. Sitting down, day after day, consistently producing work even when you might not have any inspiration handy, is what I aspire to, am proud of, and find awe-inspiring in others—like Weedle’s little brother, who apparently is no longer little.

I hear variations on this theme often. Someone wants to be a career musician but they work toward that goal by jamming with friends in the basement. Someone wants to be a career writer but they’ve been working on one novel for umpteen years. I know several career musicians but none of them earn their living by putting out albums of original music with a band. I know many, many career writers but none of them—not a single one—earns their entire living writing and selling fiction.

All this long and winding road is to say, a lot of times being in the creative career of one’s choice is not the way one envisioned it from the outside.

If you want to make writing a viable income stream you have to be able to make yourself write pretty much all the time. Writing one novel one time is not going to do it. If you want to earn your living this way, you cannot wait for inspiration to get you writing. You have to be able to do it rain or shine, with or without inspiration. Even when the muse is bad or conspicuously absent, you have to be able to write anyway.

That means no waiting around for inspiration’s ungentle backhand. If you want to be a writer, and you want to be any good at it, you have to do it all the time. It doesn’t have to be every day but it has to be often and consistent. You have to practice writing to get good at writing. Time spent dwelling on the possibilities of what you will write does not translate to writing experience.

If you spend years or decades developing the idea for the project you think of as “your baby” instead of developing your writing skills through study and practice, then when the time comes to sit down and write “your baby” you will be woefully unprepared.

If you’re a person who has always waited for inspiration to grab hold of your shoulders and shake you around like a martini before you put pen to paper, sitting down to write with an empty mind can feel daunting. To help with that, I’ve got four easy steps you can follow this morning, today, right now, to get your mind working on writing, inspiration or no.

Dump the Junk in Your Trunk

Stop messing around with your trunk stories today. As of now, your trunk is closed for business.

The term trunk in this context has two, closely related meanings. A writer’s trunk may be where they keep all the stuff that has been written but will never see the light of day, or it may be where they keep the stuff that has been written but has not seen the light of day yet. Either way, it refers to the stuff they’ve written in the past that is not (or not yet) published.

Time to close the trunk. Whatever you have in there, either put it to work (submit them to a market) or put it out to pasture. Do not, under any circumstances, mine your trunk for old stuff to work on some more.

Every writer has trunk pieces; it’s not just you. I’m pretty sure every writer, at some point or another, tries to use the trunk to get out of their writing obligations. If you want to get into a consistent and productive writing habit, don’t lean on your trunk. Don’t trot something out for another look because it’s easier than writing something new or you don’t have an exciting idea for something new. Don’t waste your writing time and energy on reconsidering old, trunked work—that’s an avoidance tactic. Stop it.

If you sit down to write and find your mind wandering to the stuff in your trunk, squash that impulse. Start something new.

Create an Idea Bucket

Trunk’s closed. You gave it a good slam, right? So it doesn’t pop open on 495 and dump your unfinished writing all over the road? Good. Next up: Creating a “bucket” for story ideas to go into.

You can create your bucket digitally or otherwise; mine is digital. I love notebooks but—alas!—most of my ideas arrive in the middle of the night. A physical notebook means turning the lights on to capture the idea and once the room lights are on sleep is ruined, so. Digital for me. Your mileage may vary.

Anyway, I have a digital folder and its very creative name is “Idea Bucket.” You can call yours whatever you wish. Obviously. If you’d rather work with a pen, then a binder, composition book, spiral notebook, or journal would work well for this.

Every time I receive an idea for a story or an idea that is “story adjacent,” such as—

• a character

• a setting

• a scene

• a snippet of dialogue

• a random line of text my brain spat out

• a word, phrase, or idiom I heard and liked

—or anything else like that, I create a new, empty document inside the folder and I write that thing, whatever it was, however much I have, inside the document. I give the document as descriptive a name as possible then close it. My descriptive names include things like, “spaceship library dream May 11” and “capgras delusion” and “reanimated kitten skeleton”; they’re just so I can tell what’s inside. Don’t think too hard about it.

It doesn’t matter how trivial, silly, or stupid the idea is. Your mission is not to keep only the good ideas. Your mission is to keep all the ideas. Even the ridiculous ideas.

Especially the ridiculous ideas.

If you are working on paper, do not create this list of ideas in list form, with one item after another. Give each idea its own page or spread. You might think about putting a table of contents at the start of your notebook or putting descriptive titles on sticky notes that overhang the side of the book block, though, because you will want to be able to find them quickly.

This is the basis of your idea bucket. Every time you think of something new, add it. Every time you think of something that adds on to an idea already in the bucket, open the corresponding document (or turn to the corresponding page in your notebook) and put the new thing there. Once I have three to five concrete “things” down for one idea, that’s usually enough for me to start writing it.

Keeping my ideas in a bucket like this helps me in two important ways:

1. I always have a pile of ideas laying around that I can pick up and start writing when I don’t have something clamoring to be written.

2. This method stops me from leaving stories halfway finished as I suddenly jump to a new one because “inspiration struck.” I feel confident I won’t “lose” a potentially great idea if I put it aside to continue working on whatever is front and center.

I’ve been putting things “in the bucket” for a couple of years and I have enough separate documents sitting in the bucket to keep new projects queued up for at least ten or fifteen years without having to come up with anything new. You want to be the writer who has more great stories in them than they can possibly write in their lifetime. Everybody should want to be that writer.

Add Three Ideas to Your Bucket Right Now

Literally stop reading and do this. No, wait. Read this section first and then stop reading and do this, and then come back and finish the article.

Let's add three new ideas to your brand-new idea bucket. Don’t go rummaging around in your trunk, that’s closed. New ideas.

Here, I’ll go first to show you how easy it is. We’re on the honor system: I give you my word these are new right now and not from my trunk:

• A bike courier suddenly and unexpectedly comes into possession of a mysterious parcel that is being pursued by other, unseen characters for reasons she does not understand. She must figure out what it is and whether she should be trying to get it to the people who are hunting for it or keep it away from them. I put this under the heading, “mysterious car window parcel.”

• An apprentice mage steals a secret scroll belonging to his master and goes on the run with it, hoping he can decipher the powerful spell within and use it to make his fortune—only to discover that it is merely an old family recipe for cough medicine. I have labeled this, “magical cough syrup.”

• A newly discovered aphrodisiac for giant pandas has worked altogether too well and China is drowning in pandas. Because the rest of the world has been indoctrinated to see pandas as the poster-species for conservation, panda extermination efforts are causing international outrage. A mid-level bureaucrat is tasked with developing a persuasive and comprehensive anti-panda propaganda platform. I did not expect that to end up in a hilarious rhyme but I’m glad it turned out that way. I have labeled this document, “too many pandas.”

I don’t mind if you lift my ideas because ideas aren’t valuable. You can take these ideas for yourself; you are welcome to them. But doing so does not fulfill the terms of this exercise—you must come up with three new ideas on the fly. Go do it right now. New ideas! I’ll be waiting when you get back.

Keep Generating New Ideas

Welcome back. If you took a few minutes to come up with some ideas, your bucket should now contain at least three ideas. Go ahead and add any other ideas you’ve been kicking around but not started working on. Feel free to put the anti-panda propaganda extravaganza in there too, why not.

The final step is less something you will do and more something you will not do (like you will not go rummaging around in your trunk): Do not lie back and relax on your pile of fresh ideas. You need to continue generating more new ones. Don’t look at your three or six or twelve or thirty-seven ideas and say, “Okay, now I have enough and I can stop coming up with new ideas for awhile.” Why? Well:

1. Not every idea is going to pan out. Some of them are going to be bad. Not the panda one, obviously that one is gold. But some will come to nothing.

2. Some ideas will combine. Sometimes a snippet of dialogue that got its own spot in the idea bucket will turn out to be from the mouth of a character who also had their own spot in the idea bucket. Two ideas become one. Now you have fewer ideas. Make more ideas.

3. Your best idea might be right around the corner. No one can ever be sure they’ve had their best idea. Don’t stop generating new ideas because you think you’ve already found the ideal idea—you might be wrong.

4. No one, no matter how hard they try, will come up with nothing but unusably bad ideas. If you think all your ideas are bad, deliberately keep writing down more bad ones. There’s no way you don’t get a good one eventually.