4 Ways to Generate Story Content

Don't tell me a story right now, just write. Good advice not only for this blog, but for any writer struggling to get ideas out. Notice I didn't get into some random appeal to emotion like, "We have all gotten stuck with our writing," or "Getting started is always the most difficult part of writing..." The reason I didn't do that is because I'd like to impress upon you that statements like that are the same, boring, stagnating platitudes that every blog or article about getting started on a story starts with, and consequently, if the blogger (or whoever wrote the article) is starting their article about how to get creative with uncreative, boring, and hackneyed cliches like that, chances are you shouldn't listen to what they're recommending. Consider this: if you're a writer having trouble getting a story started, or the content for a story you're writing feels hackneyed and uncreative, why seek a source of hackneyed, uncreative advice?

I can't--and will not--speak for everyone, but I know that I get stuck generating content, and here are some of my go-to suggestions for getting started on a shorter, or longer project:

1. Think character, setting, and premise.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but oftentimes writers can get overwhelmed with general ideas that they can't formulate and develop the overall feel (pacing) of the story as well as the tone and mood they want to establish. Furthermore, they may get excited about the theme or message they want to convey, but can't generate the actual plot--the events of the story told in a particular order. This one seems a bit odd, but how many times have you sat down to write and just stared at a blank screen (yes, I'm admittedly sounding like other bloggers here--I'm an honest fellow--but hopefully I'll leave you with a bit more to chew on by the time I'm finished here)? Well, stare no more: think character, setting, and premise.

If you're falling into the blank screen stare syndrome, consider literally bulleting these three features on your paper, and you'd be surprised how quickly a character and setting come to mind. Oftentimes, those are the two easiest ones to formulate. For the premise, consider what I mean by that. Premise is the circumstances and events that are immediately surrounding that character. These could be specific or general. After all, these are just story ideas, not the entire story, so these don't have to be pin-pointed down. A good friend of mine, whose writing ideas and content are much more creative and further reaching across genres than mine ever will be, always had me think about this if I was having trouble generating ideas (thanks, Lyndon). Keep in mind, a complete story may not come out of these, but these are easy ideas you can add to your story idea folder you have saved on your laptop or listed in your journal. It may sound silly, but it's pretty simple. Let's practice it right now:

Look out your window and observe the setting around you and if there is anyone outside you can use as character material. As I look out across the wetlands behind my house on a rainy afternoon, there's a vacant construction site near the wildlife preserve because work has been cancelled today due to the rain and mud. There's a flock of geese flying overhead toward a pond. So my story premise is this: Maybe there's a construction worker (character) who works at this site who likes to hunt, and has come back in the evening to hunt geese, driving out onto the wetlands (setting) here, but before he is able to leave after hunting (whether it be successful or not), he manages to get his truck stuck in the mud because of the rain, leaving him with figuring out how to get it unstuck without alerting the suspicion of his boss or the property owners as to why he was out there, after hours, on private (albeit commercial) property (premise).

Now, this idea may seem mundane or simple, but from there, you can decide whether this character is worth investing into or not.

2. Re-tell something from a different point-of-view

Have you ever read a book, watched a movie, or even read an article about a person and an event and wondered, "I wonder how so-and-so felt about that?" These are great opportunities to develop stories from. One reason is that you have part of the story and characters already created for you. The other great reason that re-telling a story or event from a different point-of-view is that from their perspective, there may be another side to the story--or simply more of it--to tell. This may be a way to generate material for exposition because part of the story has already been told. Sometimes there may be characters who are not in the story, but are logically a part of it because they are in that original setting too, and they may have experienced the events that unfolded. Therefore, there might be an opportunity for an interesting story to be told from their point-of-view. Successful stories like this that come to mind are John Gardner's Grendel and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, to name a few. Now, I strongly urge you to use caution when doing this, because its creative angle only works if you know the content and subject matter extremely well. Furthermore, when using similar fictional characters, be sure to clarify for copyright infringements, but it may be a fun place to generate ideas if you're getting stuck coming up with characters and premises on your own.

3. Write down ideas about subject matter you like, and that you would like to read about.

This one may be the most hackneyed and unoriginal on the list, and it may sound similar to the last suggestion I give. However, I will hope to steer you in a different direction with this exercise than what's most-commonly applied in the hackneyed articles that give this as a suggestion for creative enterprise.

What I mean about topics you know about is the subject matter or content. What actual real-life things interest you? Do you like looking for fossils, or do you go bass fishing a lot? What actual content can you use to tell stories about? Your experience on a Navy destroyer when you were in the NAVY? Your experience going through culinary school? Your career as construction worker or your experience growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of crime?

When I say write what you know about, I don't necessarily mean events or even processes. Anyone could technically write about any subject they wanted to, barring they gather and collect as much research as they can--or need--concerning the subject. What I mean here is that I want you to explore memories and feelings that you've had based off of an event or personal experience, and think about those memories that generate a certain curiosity for you about the impact that it may have--or may not have--had on you. Look for a story that needs to be told based off the experience that you had, and think of the type of character who might be best qualified to tell it.

4. Convey emotions, ideas, and events that You have experienced and in a way only you can tell it, not the feelings that other writers have experienced and in the way they've told it.

This, again, may seem like no-brainer stuff. However, many writers become constipated with story content because they spend too much time trying to do two things, both of which I am, admittedly, guilty of more often than I'd like to think: 1. We spend too much time obsessing over what's trendy in the book market. We see an endless array of teen vampire novels getting published, and so we start thinking maybe we could write one, even though Bram Stoker perfected it back in the 19th century. 2. We get attached to something we like and think is good, and spend time trying to emulate that writer. Again, I am guilty of this. My top-five writers, in varying order depending on how I feel that day, are: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, C.S. Lewis, Tony Hillerman, and Ernest Hemingway. I don't know how many times I've sat down to write a story and I can hear Hillerman's narration in my descriptive passages; I can hear Hemingway's minimalistic, suggestive description, his minimalist, but overtly-intentional dialogue, his simplified, but intentional action that are all meant to convey something in a larger metaphorical sense. I can hear Irving's robust and warming exposition and internal monologuing (thought) in some of my characters' reflectiveness. Now, these are all good things, but what it does to my own writing is that it pigeonholes it into being a ship-shod, poor re-embodiment of very good literature that I have no immediate context for (because the voice, emotions, and connection with the experience and content are not truly mine), therefore, they come off forced and boring because they are not my stories to tell. Now, what I've tried to capture with this final suggestion is the idea of finding your own voice. I hate using that platitude, and therefore, I presented A TON of context for you to understand what I meant by it before I just gave you a boring generalization about what to do.

So how might this whole process for generating a character, setting, and a premise for a story work? Let's look at the following exercise.

Suppose you sat down to write and had found your setting and character. Keeping in mind the previous suggestions, you may have gotten a visual of the setting from looking out the window of your car, and the character is a young man who you saw fueling up at the gas station as you drove away. Furthermore, maybe there was another man--an older man--at the gas station fueling up his car as well. From there, maybe you know a lot about cars, and therefore, you want to center the story around this old man who has this old car that's always breaking down, and this old man is always trying to maintain it instead of selling it. Now, thinking of an emotion that you would like to convey in the story through a metaphor to go with this premise, are there things that we experience in life that break down, that we're always repairing, but we can't ever seem to just get rid of them? I can think of something. It sounds like a bad relationship. So given the premise, perhaps the guy at the gas station keeps trying to get the car started, and it won't work. Maybe it parallels your main character's (the young man who is observing this) inability to get a relationship of his started again, or repaired, and it simply isn't working. Maybe the story follows that the old man must get a ride, maybe from Lyft, or a friend, and so he has to make arrangements to do so. In other words, he has to compromise because the car (relationship that your narrator is in) isn't working, and so it juxtaposes the problem with the car with the problem in your main character's life, and only when he changes his method of transportation (i.e. his relationship choices), will he get a different result with this relationship that this whole car incident with the guy at the gas station is paralleling.

Finally, how might the metaphor that you're conveying through the scene be paralleled by the setting and other characters around them. (keep in mind that the events are showing that things are broken down and not working, right?) What other things literally, might not be working then? Perhaps the free air machine is not working for someone who has pulled up to it. Perhaps there is a husband and wife who are parked at an adjacent pump and their relationship isn't working because the narrator tells us that the wife is reading a book, ignoring the husband as he taps on her car window to ask her something...Maybe electricity is out in the store. Maybe the car washed is closed.

Can you see this whole process working here? Again, notice that from a simple premise of a character, setting, and an event, we have a longer and bigger story idea. Think about piecing together story ideas from different things and see if you can find a parallelism between actual real life settings, characters, and events, and some bigger idea or lessen you want to tell through these random events. All you have to do to start is write down the character, setting, and premise, then just go for it!

Like I said, there is no formula for creating and developing ideas for a good story, the only wrong formula would be to not look around your immediate environment, and the characters and circumstances in your life--however, big or small--and see the possibility of story content coming from them. Remember, you always have a story to tell, it's only a matter of finding a character, setting, and premise to get you started.