5 Awesome Places to Find Story Ideas

We all need to fill our creative tanks every once in a while, right? Sometimes we get dry or blocked, and the ideas just don't flow. Here are five places to look when searching for those elusive ideas.

1. National Geographic: Besides just being one of the coolest organizations around, they are a surprisingly awesome place for story ideas. Stories come from people and cultures and histories and that's what National Geographic is all about. Take the studies and explorations from their web and magazine articles and spin off them and flesh them out and you've got a story.

2. Mythology, fairy tales and folklore: These are the Original stories. Every culture has their own folk tales, take the ones from your history and family and use them. Think of how many stories are based directly on Norse or Roman or Greek mythology (Percy Jackson anyone?) but it doesn't have to be direct. Just take them as a bouncing off point. My favorite is D'aulaires book of Greek Myths

3. People watching game: Go to a park or a store or a track or a movie theater or a football stadium (or Disneyland, my favorite people watching place ever) and pick someone and stare at them awkwardly I mean come up with a back story and history and relationships and see what sort of story you can develop around them.

4. Pinterest: Sort of similar to number three, but one of my favorite things in terms of brainstorming is filling up a character Pinterest board and then using the characters I've pulled from all over the web as a starting point. Here's my character board to start you off with a couple ideas.

5. Ask your parents or grandparents to tell you a story from their childhood. Or it's kind of fun to use a site like New Family Search to see where your ancestors were born, where they ended up, and imagine what brought them from one place to the other.

So there's some ideas. What else would you add to this list?

Sarah Allen

Why Aren't Good Things Good for Everyone? (Or Why Isn't Everyone A Cumberbabe?)

So I've been thinking about something and it's sort of why doesn't everyone freak out at the thought of Benedict Cumberbatch's cheekbones but it's mostly more than that.

Do any of you remember that part in The Office where Pam is talking about how Jim's new girlfriend doesn't like her and she says something like "I just hate the thought of anyone not liking me. I mean, I think even the Taliban, that if they actually met me and got to know me they would like me." Sometimes I feel like that. Okay, all the time.

But with writing specifically, I think we always want all our work to be loved and adored by EVERYONE. I get to feeling like that and want everyone to know about my work and then I think of some of my favorite things and remember that even people who have read Wallace Stegner don't love him. I don't understand it, but it's the truth.

I guess it's just something I personally need a reminder of every once in a while, and it's something interesting to think about philosophically. Sherlock is Good. All the Little Live Things and Persuasion are Good. But not everybody loves them, which says a lot more about us as humans then it does about the books and art and shows and music. We are all different, and we all need to hear and feel different things at different times, and some things just click while some things don't. Maybe that isn't a novel idea, but it makes things look a little more beautiful.

So our job as writers is to reach those people who we connect with, and help them feel less lonely in the world. If we do our best work there will be plenty. I also think the best way to reach the largest audience is to write a wide variety. Focus on our contemporary novel, yes, but also write YA and picture books and middle grade and maybe romance and articles for magazines and a non-fiction book and maybe some personal essays and short stories too. Not just to get a wider audience, but to stretch ourselves as artists as well.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the day...yours?

Sarah Allen

How To Submit to Literary Magazines

Step 1: Write a story. This is not just the first, but the most important step. You're friends and writing group should have already gone over it, given you feedback, and put the piece through the ringer. It should be your best work.

Step 2: Research and read several literary magazines. Skip this step because you're too anxious to get your piece out there already.

Step 2b: Make a quick list of potential magazines using sites like NewPages, Poets&Writers, and maybe even the wikipedia lists of literary magazines that have been selected for Best American Short Stories, even though you know deep inside they're totally out of your league.

Step 3: Strictly follow the guidelines on each magazines website and submit.

Step 4: Eat chocolate to celebrate. Preferably a big bag of Rolos or white chocolate Lindor truffles.

Step 5: Check your email.

Step 6: Watch too many reruns of Frasier and Doctor Who.

Step 7: Sleep. Not really, because you're up checking your email all night on your iPhone.

Step 8: Wake up. And wonder why you haven't heard anything yet when its THE NEXT DAY ALREADY.

Step 9: Repeat steps 4-8 until you're five pounds heavier and the bags under your eyes look like purses.

Step 10: Work on other projects. In those moments when you can focus on something besides refreshing your email or checking your mailbox. This phase, along with number 1, should hopefully take up most of your time and energy, but we all know that some days that doesn't happen.

Step 11: Get an email. Beware of heart attack. You will most likely be driving and checking your phone, so be careful and at least come to a red light before you read the email. You will most likely need a few minutes to breath before you look at it anyway.

Step 12: Get rejected.

Step 13: Eat chocolate.

Step 14: Watch too many reruns of Frasier and Doctor Who.

Step 15: Finish another story.

Step 16: Repeat. Until one day the email you get doesn't start with "Unfortunately" or "We're sorry to inform you," but rather, a personalized note about how fabulous your story is and how they would love to have it in the magazine. Because that day will come. Along with much screaming and squealing and jumping and dancing and hopefully not car wrecking.

And that, my friends, is how you submit to literary magazines.

Top 3 Resources for Setting

The age of the internet makes it all the easier to set a novel in a place you've never been. There are enough resources out there that you can flesh out the details and make it real. Not only that, but when you're low on ideas and need that extra spark, the internet can help you there as well. So here are my three favorite tools that I use when I'm working on setting.

1. Google Maps: So this is kind of an obvious one, but maybe its the most useful. You can get a close up picture of anywhere in the world, and in many places Street View lets you see as if you were standing right there on the road. The novel I'm working on is a bit of a road-trip novel, and it has been really helpful to be able to use Google Maps to sort of chart the trip and take it with my characters, and see exactly what they're seeing all along the way.

2. Pinterest: There are so, so many ways to use Pinterest. As a collection place for images, it is a natural resource for not just setting, but characters and any other creatively inspiring images you want to keep track of. But for setting specifically, you can collect images of the specific place you're using in your novel, or, how I like to do it, make a general "setting" board and collect intriguing images of places you might want to use later on. Here's my setting board to maybe get you started. Any of these places seem especially interesting to you?

3. Atlas Obscura: This is one of my favorite things on the internet. I could seriously sit for hours clicking through the "random place" button, over and over, seeing how many weird and interesting places there are all over the globe. Maybe your story isn't as crazy as some of these places, or maybe you don't want to set an entire novel in somewhere like the real life Flinstones Bedrock City, but it could sure add some yabba dabba doo! Okay, sorry, that was dumb :)

Anyway, those are the places I like to play when I'm trying to flesh out the setting for my novel. Do you guys use these too? What other resources do you like to use for helping with setting?

Sarah Allen

How do I know I don't suck?

Guys, it's one of those times. I know the key is persistence, and that hard work will eventually bring you sure success. I believe that.

But it's just been soooo looong. 

I need to just be whiny and self-indulgent today, if that's okay with you guys. You know how I feel, right? I have had this novel done for a while. I've been querying it for a while. Heck, I've been querying some of my short stories since I was a freshman in college. But the rejections keep piling in, and it feels like I have so little to show for all the effort.

I think my perspective is probably skewed here, and it probably isn't nearly as long, comparably, as it feels. Other writers much awesome than I have had to wait a lot longer than this for their success. Everybody has to put in the hours, that's just the way of it.

But after a while, the lack of success starts to wear on you and you start fearing that your book actually totally sucks, that you can't write, that you're a hack. I've been feeling like that lately. If my book was any good, shouldn't it have found success already? Part of me knows that's ridiculous, I mean, The Help, a completely fabulous  book, was submitted to fifty agents before it got accepted. That sort of helps, but it doesn't make me want to just be published already any less.

Rushing things is not a good idea either, I know that. If I really do suck then I definitely don't want to be out there until I suck less. On the other hand, I do believe in my characters and my story and I want them to be out in the world. But also, it's impossible to be objective about your own work, and what if you just suck?

Anyway. The thing to do when feeling this way is to do your best work on your current project, and that's what I'm trying to do. Hopefully it will just make success, when it does come, all the sweeter.

What do you do when confronted with these thoughts?

Sarah Allen