I had another discussion lately with a prospective writer who claimed they couldn’t come up with anything to write about. I don’t see how that is possible. Open your eyes! There are ideas everywhere! It is literally impossible to have no ideas if you are even remotely competent.

So here’s how I come up with ideas. Keep in mind, I have 40+ books I already know I’m writing in the future. This honestly isn’t that hard.

First off, there’s an easy way to do this and I’ve been doing it for years. Start an ideas file. I’ve got a Word file where I put all the ideas that I have. They don’t have to be complex. Fragments of concepts are just fine. Write all of them down. Occasionally, read through your file and see which ideas seem to gel together. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Rarely does a day go by that I don’t add at least one or two ideas. It is now thousands and thousands of ideas long. Anything can spark an idea. TV, movies, books or random shower thoughts. It doesn’t matter. It’s not hard to think “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” Write it down. You might never use it in a story, but having a record of it can spark other ideas. Write everything down and refer to it often.

Secondly, be willing to steal creatively. that doesn’t mean plagiarize, it means to take concepts that you read or see and mix and match them with other things to create an original idea. I was thinking about this last night when I watched Train to Busan. I wrote a zombie series once, even though I actively hate zombies. In fact, it was because I hated zombies that I wrote it. I wanted to do zombies entirely differently.

It started when I was reading the Newsflesh series by Mira Grant. It’s a decent story that I think kind of falls apart as the series goes on, but I was enjoying it, except I really don’t like zombies as antagonists. There is a very small window, between first infection and perhaps 10% of the population being infected, where humans really have a chance to win. Depending on how lethal your zombies are, humans are rapidly doomed to extinction. A scratch. A bite. Zombie blood or drool getting in the wrong place and you lose one human who joins the zombie side. You can never get that person back. It is far easier to make more zombies than it is to make more humans. Zombies don’t feel pain. They can’t  be reasoned with. Usually, the only way to kill one for good is a double-tap to the brain. Even if you hack off limbs, they can still come crawling after you. The same is not true of humans. Humans are fragile. Humans don’t survive damage well. Humans are doomed.

Therefore, it got me thinking. What if I did zombies a completely different way? They still had the same basic strengths of your standard movie zombie, but what if their creation was very, very different? I started my trilogy with that in mind. It was a time of balance. You had numerous walled cities spread across the southwestern United States, with only small groups of brave men and women willing to go out into the wilds between them. In that, there’s some measure of The Road Warrior thrown in there except gas and ammunition is plentiful. People had basically gone back to normal life within their walls. Most were not afraid of the zombies. We start with a young man, his girlfriend and his brother trying to make a living racing across the desert roads, until they stumble into things beyond their comprehension. Then, it starts to get really weird.

Another series I wrote, the idea came from the first book of John Scalzi’s Interdependency series. His main character is a woman who is forced into the leadership of a vast interstellar empire. She has no idea how to do her job or save her people. I really liked the idea of an unwilling leader, thrust into a situation and forced to adapt. I went to my idea file and looked through it and came up with two other ideas that had sat there for a while. The first was a desire to write a book from the perspective of non-human aliens. I wanted people to root for sympathetic non-humans. Second, I had written down something about empire building, starting from nothing and winding up with an interstellar force to be reckoned with. With those three ideas, I built a trilogy of a non-human peasant who found himself leading his people through no doing of his own and facing a war that he could not possibly win. He had to learn how to be a leader and convince everyone else to follow him while his world was falling down around his ears. It wound up being a story that bore no resemblance to anything Scalzi wrote, other than that one idea that was loosely lifted.

It’s not hard to come up with these ideas. Someone challenged Jim Butcher, author of the Dresden Files books, to do something with two lame ideas – Pokemon and a lost Roman legion. He came up with the Codex Alera series. It ran 6 books between 2004 and 2009. Mash some ideas together and let your creativity go wild. You should have more ideas than you will ever be able to write. Keep your eyes open and keep your mind primed and you’ll be fine.