The best way to get ideas, Dakota, is to steal them. Put on a fake nose, Groucho Marx glasses, and a stocking cap and sneak around reading some of these crazy questions. You will be inspired, and you can finally take off that hot hat. The disguise wasn’t fooling anyone, anyway.
Next time? Don’t take your little notebook and write things down.
Before you jump all over me, making the boys jealous, and citing that ‘stealing’ is wrong, I don’t mean you copy/paste entire answers wholesale. Uh-uh. Besides, that’s Advanced Thievery 301. You need a MASK for that.
Writers steal ideas all the time. Show me a book or story plot that hasn’t been written before in some other form, featuring differences only in characters, names, locations, and times, and I’ll show you a one-eyed, one-horned Flying Purple People Eater. (I made that up. Really.)
No, you just read crazy stuff, normal stuff, banter with people, read comments, and something will come to you. For instance, Ellen Vrana wrote about something that tickled her fancy.
She quoted a short poem with the line, “The trouble you reported recently is now working properly.”
If that doesn’t inspire you, I doubt much will.
Just think, you can write an entire story on different troubles you’ve had, and how you got them to work ‘properly’.
One table leg too short? After sawing most of it off, because you didn’t have a tape measure, and then losing your soup when it slid to the other side of the table and fell off the world, disproving Columbus’s silly theory, you end up with your knees in your mouth, trying to sit at your itsy bitsy table, feeling like Gulliver at a Lilliputian dinner party.
Trouble now working properly.
Ellen also mentioned a hedgehog that bumped into her foot, and how it still tickled her to this day. I commented that he was no doubt an emissary from Wonderland, and she just hadn’t deciphered his message, yet.
Here’s another example: I’ve written before about the inspiration for one of my favorite blog posts, How The Rastafari and The Doobie Settled America. Or something like that. You can find it on my blog. I was inspired to write it when someone on Facebook made the remark that she wished the Rastafari had settled America so we’d be a more mellow nation today.
Slow gasp! How can that NOT inspire anyone?
Another inspiration happened recently. My hubby was watching one of those video clip shows, and a bunch of people were racing their Chihuahuas. (I prefer the dachshund races, myself. Much more amusing.)
Anyhow, the Chihuahuas were running into each other and flying head over heels and just generally messing up the track with blood and gore. Not a lot of blood and gore, you understand. I mean, we’re talking Chihuahuas, who aren’t exactly Rottweilers, and weren’t traveling at high speeds.
My guy says, “I don’t like to watch these things. People just watch them to see Chihuahuas crash.”
Audible gasp! Is that funny, or what?
Just tonight, I was reading Erin’s answer about hobbies that get you out of the house, and she mentioned a painting class where they serve wine! Another audible gasp!
I’m not even going to tell you where my mind went. You’ll steal my idea.
https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-come-up-with-ideas-to-write-about