- Proverbs. These could be described as themes for stories in a line. For example, there are countless stories to come out of the saying "the love of money is the root of all evil". You can prove the saying true or use your story to prove there are exceptions to the rule but there are lots of possibilities here.
- Themes from songs. Listen to your favourite songs and work out what the theme is and write a story to that theme. Love is the obvious one but there are so many connotations of love. As well as the obvious romantic stories, how about a love story that isn't a romantic one? What about the kind of love that inspires bravery and so on?
- Overheard snippets of conversation! You won't be able to use the actual conversation itself. It is what led up to it that holds all the possibilities for story writing. This is because so often what you actually hear is to a specific situation and you want more flexibility than that. But overhearing, for example, a couple badmouthing another couple can lead you to write stories about whether they are right to do this, wrong to do it, what the comeback is and so on. (There should be comeback!). Do this couple usually badmouth others and, if not, what led them to do so now?
- Headlines. Again you can't use the specifics. (You don't want to be accused of libel for one thing and that would be a risk, no matter how small). What you can do is take the basic headline and work out lots of different ways as to how and why this headline was generated. Then pick the one you like the look of and write it up. Again, you are using the headline as the theme and so what you create should bear no resemblance to the actual story you read in the newspaper/heard on the news. Only you should know the original inspiration behind your tale. Your characters and the situation you put them in, based on the theme here, will make the story your own.
I find ideas for stories (and indeed blog posts!) from a wide range of sources. Some I use are:-
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AuthorI'm Allison Symes and write fairytales with bite, especially novels and short stories. Archives
October 2019
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