by Joelle Steele

I’ve been writing continuously since I was a child, and there has never been even a second where I didn’t have far more ideas than I could ever possibly use. I keep a file in which I have numerous ideas for poems, articles, books, etc. Since I have new ideas several times a day, I have to keep cleaning out that file, removing ideas that I think are good or even great but, on second thought, were probably not for me. And sometimes I realized my “great” idea was too much like something that had already been made into a novel or a screenplay. As a result, I have purged hundreds – maybe thousands – of ideas from that file over decades of writing.

I know a lot about ideas and the process of ideating. But the number one thing I have learned is that ideas are a dime a dozen. If you just get in the habit of thinking about things you experience every day in terms of their potential story value, you will probably quickly develop a facility for ideating and come up with new ideas every day. Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, my mind is always thinking about story ideas. That’s why I always have a pen and paper with me, because I get ideas everywhere. (You might prefer to type ideas into notes on your phone or tablet.)

Sometimes my ideas are about characters. This is important, because if a character isn’t “real” they will not be believable. And I want my characters to be real and unique. For example, a few days ago I was waiting in a doctor’s office where they have an absolutely gigantic aquarium. While I was there, the aquarium service man showed up to clean and maintain the tank. And I started ideating. What kind of a character might he make? What would his life be like? What kind of people would hire him? What kinds of things might happen to him during the course of a work day? Would he love his job? Did he make a good living at it? Was he an employee or self-employed? Were fish his hobby as a child? Did he keep fish at home? Did he go to college? What did he do at the end of his work day? Was there a wife or girlfriend? Children? Everyone is a potential character.

Sometimes my ideas are about things I’ve heard, maybe a little excerpt from my own life or someone else’s. A woman once told me the story of her brother who had a brain tumor. The tumor was called a “teratoma,” a growth that consists of bones, teeth, tissue, and even hair. In this case it had grown inside her brother’s head. I thought this was fascinating. I researched it further, and developed it into the basis for one of my mystery/supernatural novels in progress, “Oddities.”

The key word here is “developed.” Coming up with good ideas is easy. Ideas are a dime a dozen. I used to teach writing classes and I would have my students take five minutes in class to write a short paragraph or two about a character and story line that I would make up, such as a mechanic and a boat trip. Never once did any two students ever come up with the same character or story line. That’s because it was just an idea.

An idea is worthless until you develop it into a story. And that’s the hard part. It takes work to develop a good story. A single idea can be taken into so many different directions. What I usually do is ideate about as many of those potential directions as possible. Sometimes I write a series of extremely brief outlines or paragraphs to see how the story might turn out under different sets of circumstances. These wide varieties of outlines give me the chance to play with my ideas and come up with the best plot scenarios or the best personalities for my characters.

Most of the time, this development phase of my ideas takes place during research. And I always do extensive research before I ever start writing anything. In fact, if I had come up with an idea that would use an aquarium service person, I would have interviewed an aquarium service man like the one in the doctor’s office. The “teratoma” idea got developed into a story after I met the man who had one and then connected it with something else that came up during my research. It took my story into an entirely different direction, a direction I would never have thought of otherwise because I didn’t even know it existed. My advice to writers: Learn to see ideas everywhere and then start developing the most promising ones. You can do it!