Muse and Mischief

Another common question writers get would be how do we come up with our ideas? There is no definitive answer because that process is unique to every one of us. Some sit down and brainstorm ideas, others may research what is trending, and some wait for inspiration to strike. There is no bad way to find ideas, although chasing trends could prove risky as what is trending now may not be popular by the time the story is finished. 

For me? I’ve learned that inspiration is a muscle that can be strengthened and trained. It may surprise you that training this muscle has very little to do with coming up with ideas. What I have learned is that the key to finding inspiration is being present in the world around me. Sure, I could sit down and try to brainstorm my way into a great idea, but when I have done that the ideas that come either lack energy or are too reminiscent of something that already exists. 

I found that the best way to find ideas is to not focus on finding them. Instead, I worked and practiced on expanding myself to take in all the little details of life around me. Gradually, the ideas started to come. It was a light trickle at first but eventually became a steady stream. Like any river the flow can fluctuate, but it still moves. 

One of my favorite ideas came to me when we took our son to the local aquarium. Like most attractions the exit is placed in the gift shop. So, as my son was ambitiously perusing the shelves of toys and trinkets my mind wandered. I walked through the aisles and really felt the banality of that experience and then it came. What if we had to go through a gift shop before we exit this plane of existence? That familiar rush filled my senses and energy surged down my limbs and back up to my brain. I pulled out my phone and typed one sentence into my iWriter app. With that I was off to the races. After several months of letting the idea cook, I drafted it and it became my novella Please Exit Through the Giftshop which will come out in March 2026. 

I got the idea for my Christmas Novella from a single word. I came across it in my internet travels one day and it struck me as a very powerful word that meant longing for something that you can never return to. It made me think of how I can never return to the feeling I got growing up because both of my parents were gone. This bounced around my head for about a year. I knew I wanted to write a story about this feeling, but I just didn’t know how yet. Then last year during the holidays I was not quite into the spirit of the season for several reasons and lamented the loss of the magic I had when I was younger. That coalesced with all the other things going on in my internal and external worlds and my novella When the Candles Burn came to be. This will be my first self-published book coming out in November. 

Sometimes I get ideas from other people’s creations. Ever since I read it in high school The Handmaid’s Tale has been one of my favorite books. After another re-read at the end of the 2000s I got an idea of doing a similar story with a different premise. Back then I was really into screenwriting, so I built out the story and wrote the first draft of the script. It was too long and had so many issues, but I was still a baby writer back then. It sat for over a decade before I finally came back to it. I made some major changes to the world building and the plot, changed main characters, and got inspiration from the political climate in 2023. I wrote another screenplay, but it wasn’t hitting right. So I pivoted to make it into a novel, which I have codenamed “Olympus” and started the first draft on August 5^th. 

Over the past two years I have gathered 65 different story ideas and I’m sure I have others in my iWriter app that I haven’t added to my spreadsheet yet. Are they all winners? Honestly, I don’t know. But they all have potential. One thing I learned is never discount an idea without really exploring it and doing the work to flesh it out. Ideas have a way of evolving as you work through them so what you end up with may only be a glimmer of what you intended when you wrote down that random thought. You wrote it down though, and in the end that is what mattered. The more I opened myself up to the experiences around me the more receptive I became. My inner muse grew to understand that I made space for her to share at will and I would document it every time. It really only needs to be a sentence with that idea you capture in the moment and then come back to when you have time to flesh it out. 

So, get outside. Touch some grass, smell the flowers, and watch people in the wild. You will always be surprised by what you find.