Brainstorming

If you’ve been following my blogs, you’ll have read my Sources of Inspiration series. Hopefully this means you’ve got loads of ideas now! So, what now? How do we turn those ideas into something we can actually tell a story about? The most popular strategy is to brainstorm.

Now, that’s easier said than done right? What is it we should be brainstorming? Where do we start? There are characters, plot, setting, conflict. Personally, I’ve struggled to figure out where I should start brainstorming. Most of the time characters tend to come to me rather easily, but setting and plot is where I struggle.

Once I have my ideas and characters, I start brainstorming ways to pit these characters against each other. What about them causes friction? How can I ramp that up even further? This usually gives me my main conflict and a rough plot.

I always struggle with setting, there are just so many time periods and places that our stories could fit into. This is when I turn to dear, old Pinterest. Throw in a few keywords and ‘setting’, and boom, I have a Pinterest board for my setting to set off the brainstorm. Now we can move to more in depth worldbuilding, which I will save for another post.

If you’re still struggling to turn fledgling ideas into story elements, I find it useful to bounce ideas off of some writer friends, they often have interesting thoughts we can adapt and make our own.