How to Come Up With Story Ideas When You're Stuck

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 3, Sparking Your Creativity. Today we're talking about specific creative techniques you can use to discover and develop unique and compelling characters, plots, and settings.

Introduction to Creativity in Writing

Okay, welcome back for another week here at the show's website. I hope you've been enjoying the podcast. I've certainly enjoyed bringing them to you. Today we're going to be talking about creativity and how to spark those creative ideas. And what I'm going to do today is look at some creative tools from a book that's actually on business creativity.

Now for some of us who are really creativity-minded, that might flip a switch for us when we hear business equated to writing. We don't sometimes like to approach our creativity, our creative writing, as a business endeavor, and we kind of put up a block thinking about it. Well, I want to assure those of you that may be thinking that way right now that that's not the direction I'm taking it. I'm not using a business creativity book because I look at the act of creative writing as a business. I'm actually looking at it because we as writers need to accomplish some of the same things that people in business are trying to accomplish. We have some common ground.

For instance, like a person in the business world, we desire to build new, interesting things that haven't existed before. Let's say that we're a businessman that's trying to think of the next great restaurant. Well, in our writing, we have a similar challenge. Unless we're going to set all of our settings, if you're like me, I end up with some of my characters, at least in my rough drafts, just kind of sitting around in restaurants and talking about things. And that usually changes in a revision, but when it doesn't, as a writer, I've got to come up with something interesting, something new about a restaurant setting to make that setting come alive, to make it different. Well, that's the same thing that business creativity experts are trying to do.

They're trying to find that new and interesting angle on settings, on the places that people go and the places that we buy things. They're also looking for unique angles, just like we as creative writers are looking for unique angles. We're trying to find a unique angle on an idea or on a theme or on a story or on a trope. And we have that shared with business creativity people who are always looking for new angles to either market a product or adapt a product.

So we have a lot of common ground. And it is true that our work eventually is usually a product. I mean, unless we're just writing strictly for ourselves, which is a great way to start a first draft, by the way.

But if we're writing for anybody other than ourselves in a sense that other person is a customer, so it does pay for us to put a little bit of thought into our creative writing as a product. Now, not a lot. I'm probably like you in that I have resistance to that idea. It makes it feel a little less artful, a little less like a craft when we approach it that way.

Creative Techniques Overview

So we're not going to be focusing on that aspect today. But the point is we can use what business people are using in our creative writing. Now, today I debated between two approaches, and that is to just bring you a whole bunch of creative ideas and cover them just surface level or bring you a couple that I find really effective and really get into them a little deeper. And I've decided on the second approach. We're going to look at two effective creative games that generate new angles, new ideas about our writing and get into those just a little bit deeper. And the book that I'm going to be pulling these from is a book called Thinker Toys.

It's written by Michael Michalko. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right, but it's M-I-C-H-A-L-K-O, Michael Michalko. And the book's been around a while. It was published in 1991, and it's actually a book that I used when I was in the business world to make my marketing more creative, more effective. And I found, you know, I was certainly doing creative writing back then, too. And I found that these two games especially were applicable to my creative writing.

Now, I hesitate to recommend the book as something that you should run out and buy because certainly it is a business creativity book, and I wouldn't say that the majority of the book is applicable. But there definitely are some key things in there that really resonate with the creative writer. And I'm going to be sharing what I think are the two best of those today.

Reversal Technique Explained

So the first thinker toy, the first creative angle that we're going to take is called reversals. And basically what it is is that it reveals our deepest assumptions about something and then challenges them. So what is it? Take whatever you're working on, plot, setting, character, and what you do is you write down three givens about it. Your three most fundamental assumptions about that thing. And then you reverse those assumptions and ask yourself how that reversal could be true.

Now, that's a little abstract at this point, and we're going to walk through some examples of that. But first I want to tell you what Michalko says are the four benefits of this approach because I think they're really powerful in our writing. The first benefit is that it provides us an escape from looking at a challenge in the traditional way.

The second is it frees up information so that it can come together in new ways. And a little bit we're going to talk about defamiliarization, and that's a benefit of this approach. The third benefit of reversals is it allows us to think provocatively. And I love in his book, he actually explains it with a sentence. Take a novel position and then work out its implications. Did you catch that?

Take a novel position and then work out its implications. I think there's a double meaning there, whether he intended it. Of course, novel as unique, but also novel as unique ideas that can fuel our novels, fuel our writings. And the fourth benefit he lists is that we can find a breakthrough with this approach. And in the business world, of course, that's a new idea that can be marketed. In literature, for us as creative writing, we're looking for that breakthrough that resonates with our theme or further illuminates our character.

In other words, we're not just looking for a breakthrough or a novel position just because it's new, just because it's interesting. It has to serve a dual purpose for us. It has to be not only interesting, not only creative, but it has to serve that purpose of further developing our theme or further illuminating our character.

So let's see how it works. And I'm going to go through character, setting, and then plot in order here and use this technique of reversals on each one so that you can get an idea of how it works and the benefits of it. So we'll start with characters. And a lot of this is just very random so that you can get a really true look at how it works and hopefully apply it to something in your writing.

So for this example, I invented an auto mechanic as my character. So I said, let's say that the character in this story that I'm working on is an auto mechanic, but I want him to be more interesting. I want to provide some other layer to him as an auto mechanic.

So what I do is I take my three assumptions about an auto mechanic, and I just write them down. For me, those assumptions were, one, he fixes cars. You know, an auto mechanic fixes cars. For assumption two, he charges money for that. And assumption three, I wrote down, is that he has a specialized skill.

So you can see here I'm not trying to be creative at this point. I'm just listing the three things that for me define an auto mechanic. He fixes cars. He charges money. He has a specialized skill.

So step two in reversal is I'm going to go through each one of those independently, and I'm going to reverse it. And then I'm going to see how that can be true in the case of this character. So I'm going to do these in reverse order. That he has a specialized skill.

So then I'd have to reverse that, and I'd have to say, okay, this auto mechanic does not have a specialized skill. Now that adds a new layer to this character as he's suddenly somebody who's a garage mechanic, and he's working on friends' cars and trying to make a living, but he really shouldn't be. He really doesn't know what he's doing. That adds a deeper level to this character. And I'm not going to explore that one too much because I didn't really resonate with that one.

The second one was that he charges money. So then we have to ask ourselves, what if my auto mechanic was an auto mechanic who didn't charge money? What does that mean for that character? And again on the second one, I came up with some fairly interesting ideas. You know, maybe he's very wealthy. He's made some money.

He's hit the lottery. I don't know what it is. But he no longer has to charge money, so he becomes really this philanthropist auto mechanic, which is kind of an interesting idea, and I wish I had one in my neighborhood.

But that one also didn't interest me too much. The one that really interested me was my first assumption. When I reversed it to an auto mechanic does not fix cars, that one got really interesting to me because I had to stop and say, okay, how could my character be an auto mechanic who does not fix cars? And as I was brainstorming, you know, don't go with the first thing that comes to you. Write down three or four or however many ways that this reversal can be true in your story. And I struck on one that I really found compelling, and that is that this auto mechanic doesn't fix cars for We're going to run through the next two settings and plot a little bit quicker because I think you've got the idea.

So setting. Let's say that we're going to use a restaurant. I mean, that to me is the obvious example. Restaurant, coffee shop. Where do people go to talk about things? I don't encourage that in your writing.

Anytime you can get people into unusual places, I think it's more memorable for us as long as it's consistent with the story. But we're going to stay with restaurant because sometimes our characters end up there. So what are three assumptions that we make about restaurant? For me, it was that they make food.

The second was that they serve people. And the third was that they advertise for customers. So when we reverse that first assumption, we've got a restaurant, but this restaurant does not make food. What does that look like? And again, just brainstorm on these. How could we have a restaurant in our book that doesn't make food?

I'm not going to go into that in detail, but hopefully that's got your creative mind firing. And hopefully it's got those synapses firing a little bit on how you could make that true, how you can have a restaurant that doesn't make food. What do they make? How do they make their money? Why do they still call it a restaurant?

The second assumption is a restaurant serves people. Well, what is a restaurant that does not serve people? You know, I immediately thought of a big city because you've got the opportunity for these little niche businesses and you've got this restaurant that serves dogs or pets. You know, it's a strange idea, certainly, but it probably exists out there. It feels like one of those things that somebody's probably trying is a place that you can take your pets and they serve this gourmet pet food. And what it really is, is a place for pet owners to network, to get to know each other, to meet other people.

So again, I don't know if it's a great idea. I don't know if it could fit into a theme or a storyline and serve a particular purpose in that story, but that's the way it works. I'm sure you can come up with a list of other ways that you could have a restaurant that doesn't serve people. And the third one is again, the one that I found more interesting is that a restaurant advertises for customers. Well, what happens when a restaurant doesn't advertise for customers? A couple of other things I thought is that maybe it's an in-home restaurant.

We've got a lot of people out of work right now. What if you had characters in your book that to make ends meet, literally started opening up their home to neighbors to come over and have dinner with them and charged a little bit for that just to try to make the ends meet. Suddenly that becomes a really interesting place for your characters to be, or maybe it's an underground restaurant. Maybe it's one of these ultra hip, ultra cool places where you don't know about this restaurant unless you know the right kind of people. And I think you can see how suddenly our characters aren't just at the McDonald's on the corner at the four seasons restaurant or these places where our rules are already defined that by using these reversals and examining our basic assumptions and then reversing them. We can create really unique places.

And as I look at the clock ticking on here and feel like we've covered this pretty well, I'm not going to go deeply into plot here, but you're basically going to do the same thing in a little bit different way. The way, the place this works the best for me is that when I have a character who's reaching a decision or ready to take an action, I'll stop, especially if I feel like it's not a particularly compelling or particularly interesting action that they're about to take or that I have them plotted to take. And I will reverse my assumptions on what they're going to do.

In other words, I'm going to write down three or four things that that character could obviously do in that situation. And then I'm going to reverse those and say, what if he does the opposite of what we expect? What if he makes a decision that is the opposite of what our readers or us as writers expect him to do? And how can we still move the plot in the direction that we want to move it if this character does the opposite of what we expect?

Now, certainly you have to justify why your character would do that. You don't want to break a character out of the reality of who that character is, but it can allow us to see our characters' decisions and our plot decisions in a new way when we do that. So again, we're not going to go into that one deeply. I think we've kind of covered it and I think you've probably got the idea.

Random Metaphor Technique

Let's see. Okay, let's, let's move on to our second technique. And this one again from Michalka's book is, he doesn't call it this. It's, it's more of an idea that he touches on in several of his, what he calls thinker toys, but I'm going to go ahead and call it the random metaphor. This is based on defamiliarization.

Now it's an approach that, that is, um, that is hopefully well known, uh, to you as a creative writer, but just in case it's not, I'm going to give you a real quick synopsis and it's basically, uh, the technique of approaching a well-known event as if you've never experienced it before. So when you're writing about something very common that, that people, um, that are so familiar with that there is a chance they're going to gloss over it and not really connect with it. One of the things we can do is defamiliarize that.

In other words, describe it as if our character and therefore our reader have never seen it before. It's something that we're going to talk about probably here in a few weeks on another topic. So I'm not going to go deeply into it, but at least now you, you, uh, are familiar with the basic concept. And that's what the goal of this random metaphor is. It's, it's to defamiliarize something that has become commonplace to us so that we can see it in a new way.

So, uh, the random metaphor sort of works this backwards. Um, it defamiliarizes your character so that you can see that character in a new way. In other words, we're not necessarily trying to create that defamiliarization for the reader. We're trying to defamiliarize ourselves with our own characters, with our own stories so that we can see them in a new way and therefore write about them in a new way and envision them in a new way. And now it's important to say, for me to say, this metaphor, this random metaphor we're going to generate doesn't get included in the words on the page. Um, we're not looking for a metaphor to put down on paper.

We're looking for a metaphor to inform our perspective. Okay. So the way this works is that we're going to, the first step is to pick a character or other element because it works on other elements besides character in your writing. Pick a character that lacks dimension, that lacks a singularity. Find that character that is flat and you just don't quite know what to do with him. And then the second step is you're going to pick a random thing, just a random noun, a random object.

There's actually, you can go online and just search random noun generator and you'll find a bunch of them. And this is something I use. It's hard to pick a random word sometimes, especially as writers. I think we have these certain words, especially tied to theme that are kind of clicking around in our heads and we want to get away from those on purpose for this.

So a truly random noun, truly random object. And then what you're going to do is you're going to look at your character and this random object, and you're going to begin to look for similarities. You're going to say, how is my character like this thing? And it's going to allow you to see your character in a new way.

So let's, uh, the best way to do this again is an example. So let's just jump right into it. And I'll use an example from the book that I'm working on right now.

But one aspect of the book is, uh, cycling, uh, racing. And I've got this character who is the team leader. And, uh, I, I, he's, he's flat because I approached him stereotypically. You know, I made him kind of a little bit cocky. You know, he's this cocky athlete, uh, very self-assured. He's good looking and he just kind of lays there on the page.

He's not interesting. He's exactly what we expect. He meets our assumptions.

And so I really felt this need to make him a singularity, make him dimensional. And so I used this technique and I'll just kind of walk you through it. I went online. I used this random noun generator, not necessary if you can generate interesting random nouns on your own, but I, I used it. And the word that it gave me was canoe.

So I almost skipped it. I almost thought, oh, that's not a good one. Let's go on and find something more like my character. No, that's not the point here. The point is find something random. And I said, okay, how is my character?

How is this leader of a cycling team like a canoe? Um, and the next step is that you list out the qualities of a canoe. Don't think about how they're connected to your character. We're just looking at the canoe.

So I listed out three or four. I said, okay, a canoe is usually wooden, so, you know, it's made of wood. So I wrote that down. I thought of how a canoe is unstable. I've had very little experience in a canoe, but the, the little that I have, it doesn't feel like a particularly stable watercraft. I feel like at any moment with the wrong move, I'm going to end Suddenly, this character could come from a family dynasty of racers, and he's driven by this expectation to be the greatest.

Now, I don't know if I'm going to use these, honestly. But I think you can see how it's forced me to take this character that I was seeing as flat, as unidimensional, and try out these different qualities and see what resonates for me. See what makes this character work. See what makes him come alive on the page for me. And some of these I really like. Some of these, I think, give him a quality of being alive and real.

And I may do this another two or three times with other objects just to generate other possibilities and see what really works for him in the story. Again, don't use the actual metaphor in your story. I'm not going to say, you know, this guy was wooden like a canoe in my story. Please don't go there.

But it's important that we look for things that resonate with our theme and that counterpoint the main character and the other characters. In other words, this is really important. Don't just go with interesting. Interesting is great, but it only gets you halfway to where you want to go. You want interesting that either illuminates your theme in some way, and we're going to talk about theme here soon in one of these shows as well.

But it illuminates your theme or it creates a character that works as a counterpoint against your main character and your other characters. So all of these things I want to stop and talk about in depth right now, but I'm not going to because they're big enough to be their own show and there's certainly piles of information about these out there. My goal really for this podcast is not to be an introductory look at the fundamentals of writing, not an introductory look at theme or character, but really to provide that more nuanced, that more craft view, just because there's so many great sources out there about the fundamentals. And I hope that you're taking advantage of those.

So we're going to go ahead and stop there with this part of the podcast, and we'll get to our weekly challenge here in just a little bit on how we can take these two techniques and put them into our writing. So it's time for our wise words segment this week. And this one was actually submitted by a listener. I so appreciate your feedback. It's really fun to start getting that in.

But unfortunately, it was through a text message at our line, and I didn't have any information to share who submitted it. So if you do submit something by text message or email or on our voice message line, make sure you let us know at least your first name and the city that you're in so that we can give you credit. This one the listener shared is from Samuel Johnson. And he says the greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make one book. As always, it's really hard for me to not stop here and talk about this great quote and what it could mean to our writing.

But again, that's not the point of our wise words. We're just going to let them sit on the page and stand for themselves. And we can make of them whatever we will. These wise words we are collecting on the show's website. You can pop on over there and click on that wise words link. And we're collecting one of those each week.

And I think it's going to be a great resource, maybe just for that moment when you need a quick little pick me up in your writing day. So I hope you'll check out that resource. If you've got a favorite quote or a favorite piece of writing advice, I'd love to share it with our listeners here on the show. Go to the website again, click on that talk to us link, and you'll find some great ways to share that with us.

Weekly Challenge for Writers

So our weekly challenge today is going to be to identify an underdeveloped character in the story that you're working on right now. Choose one of the two methods we talked about and use it to more deeply develop that character. Make him or her a singularity. Make him multi-dimensional.

So reversal or random metaphor. Choose one of those and try it out. A little bit further challenge, make sure that you find something that resonates with your theme. A creative angle is good and all, but unique angle that informs your theme is gold as long as it's not too obvious. Don't go for the simple here. Don't go for the cliche.

Search for something deeper. Next week, if all goes as planned, we're going to be talking with Jenny Baronick. She's the author of a very funny and interesting book on grammar.

Now, that's possible, I promise you. The book is called Missed Periods and Other Grammar Scares. How to avoid unplanned and unwanted grammar errors. It's a really funny book. In parts, it's a little bit risque.

But it's a grammar book that not only had me laughing, but really helped me to see grammar as not so much a set of rules to live in intimidation of, but as a set of tools to allow me to improve my clarity and my confidence as a writer. So I think it's going to be a great interview. I hope you'll check back in a week and meet Jenny Baronick with me. If you have comments about the show, suggestions for future topics, or if you just want to say hello, you can get in touch with us here at Inside Creative Writing by leaving us a voice message. That's the best way. Call.

If you'd rather save, if that's maybe a long distance call for you and you'd rather save the money, go to our website, click on that Talk to Us link and you'll find a little bubble from Google there that'll allow us to call you, basically. And again, that's a voice message line. You don't have to worry about somebody picking it up and having what could be an awkward conversation. You're just going to get a place that you can leave a voicemail for the show and hopefully get your comments on the show. And you can always send us an email at feedback at the show's website We'd love to hear from you that way as well. Or if you feel more comfortable with texting, that number I gave you earlier is a great place to text us as well.

So, until next week, I hope you'll remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do. I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the show's website Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week, but until then, join the conversation at the show's website.