Have a basic ideas 💡 for a story, but don't know what to do now? There are a lot of articles telling you how to write once you have a plot, or how to expand your plot once you have the skeleton. But what do you do if you have nothing but the idea...
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1 Get an idea? if you have one lurking somewhere, great! if not, brainstorm, mind map 🗺 or do one of the numerous other thought-generating exercises that can be found on the web. You don't need to make it a story just yet-but you do need a vague idea. It can start with anything: a phrase, a face, a character, or a situation, just so long as it's exciting and inspiring to you.
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2 Turn your idea into a story: Remember to add a little twist, as this is the high-level arc of the story. If you're familiar with the Snowflake Method, or other top-down methods of idea production, then you'll be familiar with this step. So, how do you turn a vague notion of a girl with dark eyes into a story idea? First, understand that stories are about two things: characters and conflict. Sure, there are other things in there, like theme and setting and POV and whatnot, but at the heart of every story, there are characters with a conflict. So let's take our dark-eyed girl. Now we start asking ourselves questions, with the goal of creating a character with a conflict. Who is she? What does she want? What is standing in the way of her getting it? Once you have a character with some sort of conflict, you have a story idea. Write that idea down.
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3 Turn your idea into a story plot. Now, here comes the hard part. You have a high-level idea for a story, but how do you turn that into a plot? You could, of course, just start writing and see where it takes you, but if you felt any inclination to do that, it is doubtful that you'd be reading this article in the first place. You want your plot. So here's what you do: you come up with the ending first.
