Hey! Javier here again. This one has nothing to do with clothing, I promise. Besides running Laughing Moon, I spend a lot of my free time building worlds and characters for stories and games, and the question I hear the most from friends who want to write is some version of "but where do I even get an idea?"
Here's the thing nobody tells you: getting ideas is usually not the hard part. Keeping them, growing them, and not losing track of them three weeks later is the hard part. So this post covers both. If you already have more ideas than you know what to do with, skip down to the organizing section. If you're staring at a blank page, start from the top.
Where Ideas Actually Come From
Ideas don't arrive as finished stories. They show up as tiny pieces: a strange question, a face, one line of dialogue. Your job is to collect pieces, not to wait for a whole novel to fall out of the sky. These are the four ways that work best for me.
Ask "what if"
This is the oldest trick there is, and it still works. Take something normal and bend one rule. What if the moon had a second side nobody was allowed to look at? What if a town only existed on Tuesdays? What if the villain was right? You don't need a good answer yet. You just need a question that makes you want to keep asking questions.
Borrow from real life
Real life is full of free material. The argument you overheard at the coffee shop. The story your grandmother tells differently every single time. A weird fact from a history documentary. Nobody is going to recognize where it came from once you change the names, move it to another century, and add a dragon.
Mash two things together
A lot of great stories are just two familiar things that had never met before. A detective story, but on a space station. A family drama, but everyone is a ghost. Pick two things you love that have nothing to do with each other and force them into the same room. Most combinations will be terrible. One of them will make you sit up.
Start with someone who wants something
If plots feel impossible, forget the plot. Start with a person and the one thing they want more than anything. Then decide what is standing in the way. That's it, that's a story. A character who wants nothing is just someone standing in a room.
Try writing down ten ideas in ten minutes without judging any of them. The first three will be obvious, the next four will be bad, and somewhere near the end you'll get one that surprises you. Bad ideas are not a waste. They're how you get to the good one.
Catch Them Before They Disappear
You will not remember it later. I know you think you will. You won't. The idea that feels unforgettable in the shower is completely gone by lunch, and all you'll have left is the annoying feeling that it was a really good one.
So the rule is simple: write it down the moment it shows up. It doesn't have to be pretty. One sentence in your phone's notes app is enough. A voice memo works. The back of a receipt works. What matters is that you catch it.
The second half of the rule matters just as much: pick ONE place where ideas end up. If half of them live in a notebook, some in your phone, and the rest in a document called "story stuff FINAL v2," you haven't saved your ideas. You've just hidden them from yourself more slowly.
Once a week, move everything you caught into that one place. It takes five minutes, and it's usually when two unrelated notes suddenly turn out to belong to the same story.
Turning a Spark Into a Story
Okay, so you have an idea you like. Now what? An idea is a seed, not a story, and these are the steps that help it grow.
Find the conflict
Ask three questions: who wants something, what's stopping them, and what happens if they fail? If you can answer all three in a couple of sentences, you have the spine of a story. If you can't, the idea probably needs a character with a stronger want.
Keep asking why
Why does she want the throne? Because her brother has it. Why does that bother her? Because he got it by lying. Why did nobody stop him? Every "why" hands you a new piece of backstory, and backstory is where most of your best scenes are hiding.
Figure out what happened before page one
Stories feel real when the world existed before the story started. You don't need a thousand years of history, but you do need the handful of events that explain why things are the way they are. Put them in order. Even a rough order like "the war, then the treaty, then the betrayal" will save you from a lot of plot holes.
Know your characters' basics
- When were they born? You'd be surprised how often a character turns out to be seven years old during an event they were supposed to lead.
- Who do they know? Family, rivals, the friend they stopped talking to. Relationships create scenes on their own.
- Where were they when the big events happened? This is the question that turns a list of characters into a connected world.
Staying Organized (Where Chronicle Comes In)
This is the part where things usually fall apart. One story is easy to keep in your head. But the moment you have ten characters, three kingdoms, and a timeline that covers a few generations, your memory stops being enough. You start contradicting yourself, and you only notice forty pages later.
That exact problem is why I built Chronicle. Full disclosure: it's my own tool, so of course I'm biased. But I made it because I wanted one place where the timeline, the characters, and the actual writing all live together instead of in six different apps.
Here's what it does:
- Timelines, your way: Put your events in a loose storybook order, or use fixed dated years if your world has a calendar. Either way you can see your history take shape.
- Characters and connections: Track births, deaths, and ages, and see how each character's life runs through your events. No more accidental seven-year-old generals.
- A star map of your world: Your whole history shown as a constellation you can explore. It's useful, and honestly it also just looks cool.
- A place to actually write: Chapters, illustrated page layouts, and a Book View you can flip through when you're done.
- Notes to yourself: Highlight any passage and leave a comment, like "fix this later" or "does this contradict chapter two?"
- Take it with you: Download your book as a PDF or a Word file whenever you want.
Your first history on Chronicle is free, with up to 3 characters and 20 pages, and you don't need a credit card. You can also open a sample chronicle before signing up, just to see how it works. If your world outgrows that, paid plans start at $1 a month.
And look, if a paper notebook or a wall covered in sticky notes works for you, use that. The best system is the one you'll actually keep using. The only wrong answer is having no system at all and hoping you'll remember everything.
A Simple Routine to Try This Week
If all of this feels like a lot, here's a small version you can start today:
- Every day: write down one idea. Any size. One sentence counts.
- Once this week: do the ten-ideas-in-ten-minutes exercise.
- At the end of the week: pick your favorite and answer the three conflict questions for it.
- Then: write down five things that happened before the story starts, in order.
- Finally: write one scene. Not the first scene, just the one you're most excited about.
That's a real start on a real story, in about a week, without needing a perfect idea first.
One Last Thing
Don't wait for the perfect idea, because it's not coming. What shows up instead is an okay idea that gets better every time you work on it. Every writer you admire started with something small and a little embarrassing, and then just kept going.
So write it down, keep it somewhere you can find it, and give it a little time each week. If you end up building a world, I'd love to hear about it in the comments below.