Finding Inspiration and Developing Your Ideas

Writing can be very fun. Developing your own worlds, ideas, and stories, sculpting them from something formless into a cohesive narrative – it’s as immersive as any piece of fiction you might engage with could be.

Unfortunately, that dreaded writer’s block can strike at any stage of the process. It’s not just when you’re mid-flow and unsure of how to get characters from one point to another, it can also happen when you’re just not quite sure how to develop the base idea from something generic to a firm direction. Different people work differently, but understanding some different options can reassure you that there’s help at hand.

Engage with Fiction

If you love writing fictional worlds, there’s a good chance that you also love engaging with worlds that others have created – be it games, books, films, TV shows, or any other medium. In fact, what you’re writing now could have some heavy inspirations from your favorite pieces of media that you’ve absorbed in the past. While you might be keen to avoid copying ideas, seeing how different minds approach different topics can give you some ideas on how to do the same.

Sometimes, just the act of getting out of your own head for a moment can be useful. Whether you get lost in the pages of a book or play some Australian online blackjack – the time spent away might mean that you come back to your story planning rested and renewed.

Talk to Friends

This is your story, that’s true, but fresh perspectives are always beneficial. This doesn’t mean that you have to take suggestions from others and immediately change course from what you had initially planned, but even hearing ideas you don’t want to use can better inform you of what you want to do by negative example.

That’s without even considering the possibility that you might like your friends’ ideas. Getting into a relaxed environment where you’re just throwing ideas around with your friends can get you into a more creative mindset, and potentially more excited to get back to your story with all of the fresh ideas and directions you’ve conceived for it.

Sleep on It

When you’re trying to think about your story, the ideas can often seem even more elusive. The ideas that started this whole operation might have come to you more on a whim than anything else – developing in a relaxed environment where you weren’t putting yourself under pressure to turn them into a story, so when you change that environment to a much more focused one, the pressure can be a killer. 

If you put your story on the back burner for now, you might worry that you’ll forget about it, and it’ll just stay there. However, over time, that creative urge might come back and strike as your mind looks for some escapism – fostering an environment where it’s fun to think about these ideas again rather than forcing yourself to write because you feel as though you have to.