Letting Your Imagination Run Wild in Every Day Situations

I don’t know if you’ve found a genre’ in which you write, but I feel the genre’ I chose to write actually chose me.

Let me explain…

I was out and about one day and saw a small, old cemetery. My mind immediately began imagining a ton of what if’s within my genre’. I write fantasy books, time travel, and magic.

I looked at that cemetery, which is in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and thought about magical events that could happen. I didn’t think horror, I didn’t think romance, my mind imagined time travel and magic, which for some reason it always does. That’s what I mean by, the genre’ chose me. I stared at the cemetery and thought…

• what if I were somehow able to time travel through one of the headstones?
• what if I went back in time 100 years?
• What if, when I went back, I met some of the people whose names I saw on the headstones?
• What if I was chosen to travel back for a reason?
• What if I was meant to change the fate of one of the people whose name I saw on the tombstone?
• What if they were related to me?

And on and on I went until I had a rough outline of a story.

Those imaginings, which as you can see are in my genre’, eventually became my first novella, “A Girl from Nowhere.”

I do this type of thing all the time. Sometimes, thinking “what if” questions within my genre’ in everyday situations give me bits and pieces that I can use in a variety of ways, such as:

• a colorful and unique personality I observe in a store may become a character in a story.
• a cool area of a city, park, restaurant
• an interaction on a bus, train, in line at a store or bank may become a scene in a book or a short story at some point.

I write down all these ideas in a notebook I ALWAYS carry with me. Many ideas get trashed, others become gems.

I was on a lunch cruise in Philadelphia with my husband for his birthday in January. I watched some adorable interactions between a father and his pre-teen daughter. I “what iffed” my way to a decent short story.

Read it free here ——> “Second Chances”

The ideas are endless. If you find yourself stuck without a story idea, think in your genre’ everywhere you go. If I wrote horror, maybe in my cemetery idea, my character could go back and unknowingly prevent a serial killer’s death.

If romance, my character could travel back and meet the love of their life.

You get the idea. by imagining in your genre’ of choice, you’ll never run out of good story ideas. They may not all become novels, but some or a few ideas will stick and develop into something worth writing.

The possibilities are truly endless.

Have a wonderful week and Happy Writing!

Come and chat with me in my Facebook Group, The Ins and Outs of Novel Writing.