What’s in an idea

Sorry to keep you waiting so long. It’s been a busy busy month and a half. But I’m back now, and ready to talk about one of those nebulous writing things.

Ideas.

It’s the dreaded question. “Where do you get your ideas?”

Most of the time the answer is “Hell if I know” but let’s say you’re really stuck and need to generate an idea. You could turn to ChatGPT like a chump or you could use this much more environmentally friendly option.

The moodboard method

Also known as The Pinterest Method, but you can use any site with lots and lots of stock images. Pinterest just works the best for how I do it.

When I’m really stuck and I can’t think of an idea but I have a general prompt in mind, what I do is I go to pinterest and I search for “[prompt] aesthetic.”

It can be as broad as “horror aesthetic” or as specific as “90s satanic panic aesthetic”, it literally does not matter, as long as you’re getting lots of images.

Then I go through and I start pinning every image that’s really evocative to me. I don’t stop to think, I just pin.

After I have half a dozen images or so, I go to my new board and I look at the moodboard I made (you can even make an actual moodboard if you’re crafty). Then I try to piece together how these images fit. How do they go together? What are the connections between them?

It doesn’t always work. But oftener than not, it’s enough to dislodge a story from my head. Seriously. I’ve written several stories this way, just because the images sparked something!

Example

Don’t believe me? I’ll show you. I wanted to write a horror story and I wasn’t terribly picky about the subgenre or prompt, so I just put in “horror aesthetic.” This is the moodboard I created.

And here is the beginning of the story, which I turned into a 900-word flash fiction piece that I’m very happy with.

In conclusion

Ideas can come from a lot of places. The best ones usually just hit us. But sometimes, you can speed the process along a little.

I hope this helps someone! If you try it, let me know how it goes!