Words are all around us, but when we’re searching for a precise word, we consult a thesaurus (like Roget’s) to find it. Ideas are all around us too, ideas with the potential to become stories and novels, gazillions of ideas—more than enough for every aspiring and veteran writer on the planet. However, that doesn’t mean they’re easy to identify or to anatomize for their story potential. Sometimes we have just the grain of an idea but need a push to expand it to full form. This is why writers also need an idea thesaurus, a central clearinghouse for ideas, you might say—not unlike that imaginary clearinghouse in Schenectady that Harlan Ellison once humorously referred to in response to the question, “Where do you get your ideas?”
Until now, however, such a reference work has not existed. Yes, there are books of prompts on the market, but not story situations, which is what The Writer’s Idea Thesaurus provides. These situations are organized by subject matter (twenty subjects in all), divided into ten more specific categories, with ten even more specific situations in each category. Let’s take a look at how it works.
Let me first assure you that I did not extract any of these scenarios from existing works, not even from my own. Instead I mined my notebooks—many dozens of them, which I’ve kept over the years and have stored in a large box in my study. If I had transformed all of these ideas into finished works, I’d probably be the most prolific author in the world. You see, I’m a teacher of writing (now retired) and I enjoy talking about ways to conjure up and work with ideas as much as I do turning ideas into stories. Indeed, in my previous book, Where Do You Get Your Ideas? A Writer’s Guide to Transforming Notions Into Narratives, I discuss the art of idea conjuring and offer a step-by-step approach to shaping those conjured-up ideas into marketable stories.
Ideas come to me continually, morning and night, even when I don’t particularly want them to come, such as when I’m driving, cooking, trying to sleep (I often get up in the middle of the night to jot down ideas), or even getting together with friends, when jotting down ideas is awkward, if not downright rude. Even so, I am never without at least a pocket notebook so I can make surreptitious jottings. The Writer’s Idea Thesaurus represents a carefully screened and finessed selection of the countless ideas I’ve conjured up over the years, along with new ideas that continue to stream through my head. By the way, I encourage you to develop this notebook habit too! Ideas have a way of begetting more ideas.
In addition to flicking randomly through The Writer’s Idea Thesaurus and chancing upon one story situation or another (which can be fun), you might try the following systematic approach.
First, review the Table of Contents to see how the twenty chapters and the ten idea categories under each chapter are organized. Notice that chapters are presented in alphabetical order for easy reference. Flip to an interesting chapter and category and peruse the ten story situations under each category—ten story scenarios for each of the ten idea categories in each of the twenty subjects (chapters)—two thousand story situations in all, enough to keep you swimming in story or novel ideas for a very long time. The breakdown looks a little like this:
The horror factor in Gothic fiction typically stems from its settings: dungeons, cellars, laboratories, caves, grottos, secret passage-ways—wherever darkness and mystery reign. Similarly there are non-supernatural tales to be told about curses and prophecies. The story premises that follow should help you conjure up your own Gothic chillers or real-life psychodramas stemming from curses or prophecies passed from generation to generation.
SITUATION 1: A rowboat containing a skull washes onto the coast of Spain. Accompanying the skull is a parchment containing a prophecy: Whoever finds the skull must return it to the family of the deceased, or the finders will suffer calamity. Alas, the curse is not taken seriously.
After looking at this example above, some writers might wonder whether I’m offering up too much information or infringing on one’s creativity. No, and no. A sourcebook of general story ideas such as this can actually spark creativity, especially when prompted to take those general ideas and spin them in unique ways to create something new, as we’ll see below.
Let’s take a look at four specific methods you can use to personalize these situations.
This method uses the situation you settle on as point A and relies upon your imagination to propel the idea into a full-fledged story. Let’s imagine that you’re itching to write a thriller about the search for a hidden bomb. Chapter 17: “The Search for X” will be the chapter for you. Go there and survey the ten categories in that chapter and find the category that comes closest to the kind of “search” story you’d like to write. Let’s say you choose Category 10: “The Search for a Weapon.” As with all the other idea categories, this one lists ten story situations specific to searching for weapons for you to choose from. You may finally decide on Situation 2:
A scientist with top secret information about a new military weapon vanishes. It is up to the protagonist—a CIA agent—to find her. The problem is that the scientist and the CIA agent once worked together, and each knows incriminating things about the other.
This is just the starting point, and there are many ways to approach a story idea such as this based on your own creative intuition, plucked randomly from your own creative juices. Here are three such higher-level changes you may choose to make:
You may likely come up with a dozen different ways to change the story. No matter what you choose, the goal here is to take this starting point and run with it into new directions that no other author might ever think of. Think big. Think unique.
Of course there are many other ways to manipulate a story, namely, dig into the details and change them around. Instead of making major plot changes, you can simply set the situation we noted in a specific decade. Spies in the 1950s worried about very different things than spies do now, and each kind of spy has access to different clothing styles, slang, weapons, cars, etc. Genders and roles may be swapped. Maybe the scientist and CIA agent aren’t lovers but mother and son. Or brother and sister. Or you might change the location. Perhaps the story takes place in Eastern Europe, or California, or Antarctica.
Another detail you can play with is genre. The situation we’ve used as an example leans toward a thriller and espionage, but what it if were written as romance? We’d referenced the love interest between the scientist and agent, so run with that angle. Or try science fiction. Who says this story couldn’t take place in a Ray Bradbury-esque future, or a dystopian war zone and the scientist’s new weapon could bring about the much sought after victory? Try a western. Try a hardboiled angle. Try a cozy mystery solved from the confines of the agent’s secluded office in the basement of the secret CIA offices beneath the New York Public Library. Who’s to say? You are. Play with the details and possibilities of a situation as if it was a Rubik’s Cube and you’ll soon find a story line that is all yours.
It is also possible to combine two or more situations in the same chapter. Take, for example, Chapter 1 (“The Adventures of X”), Category 2 (“Aviation Adventures”), Situation 6:
A woman aviator in the 1920s embarks on a series of adventures across the country. A male aviator, feeling upstaged by her achievements, tries to discredit her. He even tinkers with her plane.
Now let’s combine this with another situation in the same chapter—we’ll choose Situation 1 from the same “Aviation Adventures” category:
A barnstormer in the early days of aviation is determined to win a woman’s affection by staging incredible aerial feats—until he suffers a debilitating accident.
Combine the two situations and tweak the details a bit in both situations, and you might come up with a new story situation such as the following:
A woman aviator in the 1920s upstages her male counterparts by performing incredible aerial feats. One male aviator—a barnstormer—is both intimidated by and attracted to the female aviator, and challenges her to a contest. She accepts, not knowing how dangerous the contest is going to be.
This method of combining two situations into one is also helpful if you want to create a longer, more complex story suitable for a novel, although many will be suitable for a short story or novel as they are, depending on what you add from your own imagination.
If you find one situation you like, you can also take another situation from a different chapter altogether to create a deeper story, or one with a powerful subplot. For example, say you select Chapter 20 (“The Transformation of X into Y”), Category 1 (“The Transformation of Addicts and Criminals”), Situation 2:
A prisoner experiences a vision of himself as a healer. He requests a job in the infirmary and studies nursing in his spare time. But because he has a difficult time controlling his temper, he keeps missing opportunities.
Now you want to put this prisoner-turned-healer in a unique situation. How about Chapter 19 (“The Threat of X”), Category 9 (“The Threat of Natural Disaster”), Situation 8:
A hurricane is heading straight for a hospital, threatening to flood the area and cause widespread devastation. City officials must decide how to evacuate ill and frail people, many of whom are dependent on facilities only a hospital can provide.
Now you have a special character in a very dangerous situation, with plenty of room for drama, action, and redemption.
By regarding the ideas in this thesaurus as flexible and capable of being combined with other ideas as I’ve shown here, you will be able to generate many more story situations than by just flipping through and choosing ideas at random. But regardless of the method you choose, the stories you ultimately create will be entirely your own.
With this treasure trove of two thousand story situations at your elbow, you will never again have to grope for ideas to write about. The ideas are here, in embryonic form, waiting for your creative vision to transform them into exciting short stories or novels.
Enough pep talk. It’s time for you to get busy and start writing!