As always, you can read the latest chapter of Loyalty Fallen here. In this chapter, Parr feels the weight of his many secrets as a spy in the academy complicates matters. If you haven’t started reading Loyalty Fallen, I recommend you take a look at this short video first to see if you might be interested.

In today’s blog post, I’ll walk through the main ways I come up with story ideas. I typically write down 3-5 ideas every day, and it’s mainly because of these various sources. I hope these are as useful for you as they have been for me.

1. Pinterest

Pinterest is primarily an image-sharing site. However, some images have links that lead to other pages. For example, if you search “writing prompts,” not only will you have images that share specific prompts, but you can often follow links to websites that offer many more.

Personally, I also enjoy searching terms like “magic,” “drama,” and so on to try to find interesting images that spark story ideas. Alternatively, you can simply find images and write a paragraph to describe what is in the image in detail. This is an excellent exercise to get better at helping your readers become more immersed in your stories.

2. Do a twist on a favorite legend or character

An interesting exercise can be taking a well-known fairy tale or story and doing your own twist on it. You may worry that it’s been done too many times before, but the reality is that very few stories are truly unique. Most have been done before in some form or another – but they haven’t been done by you.

Pick a story and see how wild, unusual, or mysterious you can make it while still keeping the main points. You don’t have to pick traditional fairytales for this; you can also pick some of your favorite superheroes or other characters from pop fiction and practice writing a variation of that character.

3. Read up on mythology

Another one of my favorite things to do is pick an ethnicity or a particular part of the world and simply research various myths, legends, and historical events. History and mythology are two of the best places to find amazing story ideas, and while memorizing dates for tests may not have made history your favorite subject in school, I promise you that a little research in Google will lead you to far more interesting historical events.

4. R/writingprompts

Reddit is a great source for writers in general, and r/writingprompts is a subreddit that offers dozens of new prompts every day. Users can write shorts stories directly in the comments in response to prompts, and they may also receive feedback from other readers and writers. Alternatively, you can share your own prompts here and see what other writers get out of them. I’ve shared a number of prompts here, and it’s certainly the place where I get the most engagement at the moment.

5. BookTube

If you’re familiar with BookTube, it’s a subcommunity on YouTube that focuses on literature and books. You can search writing prompts directly, or you can search for BookTube hashtags. Either way, you will likely find some new story ideas.

I personally recommend:

• DoloresZsiga
• Jayleehna
• Darling.writers
• BridgeBetweenCafe (my channel)

I’ve seen a number of good ideas from each of these YouTubers, and they come out with shorts introducing new ideas regularly. I also share a lot of writing prompts on my own channel, so I suggest you check that one out as well.

6. Song lyrics and playlists

For me, music is very closely related to all of my stories. Some stories have been directly inspired by certain songs. In other cases, I listen to music as I write to get into a particular mood that helps with certain scenes. You can also find artists who specifically tell stories in their songs. I recommend finding a few artists you really like or making a playlist for inspiration.

7. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is something a lot of writers are hesitant to use. If you’re not familiar, it is an AI chatbot that can respond to prompts and generate text. Since some people are actually using it to write generic stories and fill writing platforms with AI-generated fluff, its reputation isn’t great.

Despite that, one area in which it excels is in offering prompts for stories. I’ll ask for unique, highly creative and unusual prompts focusing on unusual fantasy worlds, or I’ll ask for prompts that focus on specific subgenres of fantasy, like grimdark fantasy.

While the results can be a lot of fun to work with, keep in mind that ChatGPT doesn’t have adequate protections against plagiarism, which means you may not be able to publish works created based on some of its prompts depending on how detailed and specific they are and whether they’ve been used in other literature. That said, most ideas can’t really be copyrighted; only the execution of those ideas. But if you’re worried about being called out for copying someone else’s formula, maybe hold off on using AI.

Final thoughts

However you get your ideas, the important thing is that you write them down before you forget them. I’ve found that writing down every idea when I think of it leaves me with 3-5 per day; if instead I have ideas but don’t write them down until I get to my computer later in the day, I have one at the most.

If you enjoyed this blog post, please remember to leave a like and subscribe to the blog, as it helps me a great deal. Next week’s post will be on how you can create interactive fiction (think a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book) with Inkle. Until then, enjoy Loyalty Fallen!