There are many ways of getting ideas for a story. You can draw ideas from personal experiences, books, magazines, comic-books, the internet, movies, plays, historical events, dreams, myths, legends and heros.
To help you formulate your ideas into story, create a brainstorming chart as shown. This chart is meant as an ongoing list, where it is to be kept as a source of ideas.
| Character | Setting | Motivations | Obstacles |
|---|---|---|---|
| outcast from a planet living on earth | modern day large city | rescue earth friend from alien assassin | defeat the evil assasin who is more powerful |
| outcast from society | near future after a great war | to find the truth | fear of the truth |
| friendly alien | haunted island | stop the destruction of a planet | stop a madman from releasing bomb |
| martial-arts expert | ancient city of gold | stop the spread of a disease | overcome the lost of family |
| 100 year old muscular-man | African rain forest | stop biological warfare | fight agents and expose the truth |
| drunken man | bar | to become a king | to deny belief in a higher being |
| roaches | in a fridge | to have lunch | to unlock the door to the treasure |
After you think you have enough entries in the list, you can start formulating the concept of your story. To begin your development, here is a sentence that will help you to organize your ideas:
This story is about __________________________(character),set in _____________________________(setting) to do something_____________________________________( motivation), but has to overcome __________________________(obstacles).
Write out as many of these sentences to look at what type of stories concepts that you can develop.
Evaluate each idea to see if it is worthy to write. Ask yourself these questions:
Does the potential story idea work? Is the idea original? Once you have have decided which one is the best story concept, you can move on to developing the story using the three act-structure.
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