Story Ideas - The First Spark

Photo by Nikhita Singhal on Unsplash

It all starts with the spark of an idea. And everyone’s got one of those. During the week, I asked in the Substack chat for example notions that I could use for this piece, just one-line ideas that would illustrate the point.

Iain Rowan at Maps of the Lost offered, “What if, without knowing it, you’d stepped through a gateway into another universe in which everything and everyone are almost the same as the old one...but not quite.”

Ed offered an idea called “Moral Code”: “In the near future, all moral reasoning is governed by machines.”

Both of these are great jumping-off points for something. I’m going to call them “situations”, because they describe a condition of the world, without giving anything away as to what the story might be.

Kimberley pitched something closer to what you might imagine as a movie logline: “A man reunites with the love of his life after a long time away, but he's carrying a dangerous secret that can destroy the world.”

We don’t know what the dangerous secret is yet, and we don’t know where he has been, but the set-up certainly has promise.

And then Henry J. Fate went to town with several ideas, any one of which could turn into something great:

• A hitman is cursed with the ability to see the bright futures of his victims.

• A group of super-powered derelicts join forces to fight their city's crime and corruption (i.e. the homeless Avengers)

• Joan of Arc finds herself in the body of Napoleon Bonaparte at the height of the Napoleonic Wars.

• A high school drama club goes undercover(ish) to solve the murder of their director.

These all appeared within a few minutes of me asking. Ideas are not in short supply.

But in order to get underway with a story in any medium, you have to turn that initial spark into a robust idea. And how do you start to go about that?