“Okay, I have an idea.”
“What?”
“Let’s just be honest with each other for five minutes. For five minutes whatever we say right now is going to be completely honest and after the five minutes are up, we can choose to forget about this or remember it.”
The “What-If” Writing Method
Sometimes when I’m writing, brain just....stops. No more ideas. No more words. Nothing. Sometimes, the solution to this problem is to simply take a break from writing and let your brain relax. Other times, though, you really are just at a block for ideas. This happened to me significantly more often than I would like, but thankfully, I’ve developed a solution that works well for me, and it’s uncreativly titled the “what-if” method.
Get a piece of paper and pen. Or a Google doc, or whatever works best for you.
Start brainstorming questions about your story, or possible “what-if” scenarios. (Ex: What if my character got framed for a crime they didn’t commit?)
Write down every single idea that comes to your head. Even if it doesn’t really work for your story. Even ones that deviate from your existing plot. Even the stupid ones. Especially the stupidest ones.
Cross out the ideas you don’t like, circle the ones that you do like.
Start coming up with answers for the questions you circled, or expand in the by coming up with more questions. (Ex: They would have to prove they didn’t commit the crime to regain their freedom. How do they prove it?)
Repeat until you have a full idea that you can work on/write with.
That’s it. That’s the whole strategy. I’ve used this a million times, and it’s gotten me out of a million cases of writers block, so hopefully it can work well for you too! Happy writing!
I thought of a fanfic idea where it’s about Lee Fletcher growing up in camp half-blood and his life throughout of the years and I wanna bring him back to life buttttt I realized that sounds a lot like your fanfiction life of short archerr even though I didn’t take inspiration from that fanfic, I’m still gonna ask permission if it’s okay I write that fic
oh my gosh, absolutely! I definitely do not own the trope and that sounds awesome, go for it <333
maybe dm me when you post it? I'd love to read <33
Heyy!! Where do you get your motivation or the ideas for your fanfics lmao 😭😭
hi!! <333
ooh good question
to be honest, my motivation comes from the fact that I a) have no life and nothing better to do and b) that I actually have about sixteen wips in progress, so when I don't feel like working on one, I work on a different one
sometimes it makes updating unreliable or getting a certain storyline done slower, but in general, it works for me :)
and in terms of ideas.... to be honest I'm just hit with it at the most random times, normally when I have something else simple distracting the loud bits of my brain
For example, when I'm walking. When I'm on my school bus and looking out the window. When I'm sat in bed in the middle of the night and crocheting or listening to music and staring at my ceiling. It helps having a certain part of my brain stimulated for the ideas to flow
I also tend to ponder over a new idea for a day or two, refining it and figuring out which version of it I want to use. Sometimes I don't like the original idea I come up with but I do like what I made from it, so I switch the storyline around in my brain a lot before writing anything down.
And the ideas themselves can come from anything. A conversation I heard on the bus, this certain part of another book I've read that's given me a whole load of new ideas, a new topic I started learning in my history class, whatever. As long as I can pull a story from it, it works. And, honestly, sometimes I'm that out of ideas that I resort to OTP generators and the like. (Basic, I know, but it works :D )
So yeah, that's what works for me, but everyone formulates ideas differently. And as for the motivation... I only write if I want to. It shouldn't be a chore. It should be a passion :)
hope that helped! <333