Here are more notes on a great panel at Life the Universe and Everything SF/F symposium. The topic is on coming up with story ideas.
– There are various ways to come up with story ideas. There were a few. First you come up with ideas. Ideas come from life’s experiences. Second, role-playing can be a good source of story ideas. Or you can write a story about any object, such as, a muddy boot. What is the story behind that boot?
– Some additional ideas I have is that I will go walking down an art show look at a piece of art that someone has done and then think what the story is behind that piece of art. Another way is to look at the newspaper looked ahead. And see how a good input that idea or story into your universe.
– Some authors have done the following devices for their own stories. One author had the idea of sisters visiting members of the congregation being accused as doing espionage and therefore there could be a story. Another author came up with an idea about how to spell checker is used to fix words and so she used as a spellchecker for actual spells and therefore got a fancy story.
– I had a similar idea in my book called spellbinders. Which is a story of some grandchildren of the gods of Olympia, and have a spelling bee with an elementary school. But when they have a spelling bee. There spells become reality. So it’s fun to see a fellow author with a similar slant. Why do that yet separate.
– The question was asked the panel about how role-playing can be of help in story ideas. If some of my ideas on that question. With different people playing their different personalities in different roles of each character and therefore you’re already have an example of unique distinct characters for story. Then as a variety of adventures that the role-playing game can play therefore given a lot of action in the story versus a must have the talking heads or maybe expository lumps. Using role-playing can give you a mix of adventure, dialogue and progression of clock
– Another idea I have is, let’s say that you think of a favorite scene in a book you love. Have you suddenly have that book. Turn left instead of right and you have characters that are maybe hot pot into the universe. The don’t belong there, so that that is the starting point and then you create your own ideas known elements in that different altered story.
– Some authors really benefit from brainstorming with their friends. They will actually present an idea, maybe even play a game of it, and in a different characters respond to different ways and their ingenuity can help embellish and add a variety, and surprises in your own plot.
– The question was how does an operative the brain open to receiving new ideas. Some authors say to get enough sleep that can help others jokingly say that insomnia help simplify this. The suggestion was given that you want to find your most productive time that you do well in writing and make to try to write in that time. You need another suggest that was given was to avoid distractions.
– The challenges that many authors will have writing slumps or they get discouraged about the writing and question their quality of writing. The suggestion is given to push on through it because it’s easy to edit sums been written that and a blank page.
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