Schmidt - Inspiration Overdose: Too many ideas for science fiction, horror, and fantasy stories

Inspiration Overdose

Too many ideas for science fiction,
horror, and fantasy stories

Douglas N. Schmidt

Copyright 2018 by Douglas N. Schmidt

All rights reserved

This book is designed to get rid of writers block for good. While other creativity tools offer you a few exercises or tips, this book takes more drastic measures. It holds writers block down and beats it to death.

There are over two thousand story ideas here waiting to inspire your next science fiction, horror, or fantasy story. Just flip to the Story Idea Vault and youre sure to find something appealing for your next project.

This book also has a variety of tools and techniques to transform story ideas into something entirely new. Try them all and pick your favorites, or choose one at random and write for an hour, then switch to another. Switching things up keeps the writing process interesting and your creative sparks flying. (Just remember to wear eye protection.)

Combining these tools and technique with the ideas in the Vault can create over five septillion combinations! Thats a five with twenty-four zeroes after it, or more story ideas than there are stars in the universe.

Most likely, there are more story ideas in this book than you will ever need. Maybe even too many. You might become such a prolific writer that your house ends up filled with your work, with mountains of books stacked everywhere, until someone slams a door and they topple over and you end up buried alive under a literary avalanche. So to be on the safe side, I wouldnt write more than a couple billion stories. Maybe three billion, if you use a small font.

Select two or three ideas from the Vault and mix them together. Throw them in an outline and hit frappe, blending them into a new story premise. You dont have to use whole ideas. You can pull the conflict from one, an invention from another, and a villain from a third. To increase the difficulty, look for two or three ideas that are as different as possible. The trickier the challenge, the more creative you have to be to solve it.

This is another way to merge story ideas. Pick an idea and start writing your tale. Dont worry about how its going to end. After youve written a few pages, pick another idea from a different section of the book. If you start with Artificial Planets, you might turn to Gender Roles, Werewolves, or maybe The Afterlife. Keep writing your story, linking your first idea to the next.

Keep adding links to the chain of ideas until you reach what feels like a natural and satisfying ending. If you try this with a friend, you can compete to see who can write the story with the most ideas in their chain.

This is another way to story chain that takes a bit more time to set up. Pick twenty-five ideas and write them on index cards. Shuffle the cards and deal them into a five-by-five grid. Place a marker on the center card - a coin, a chess piece, an RPG miniature, that glass eye you won in a poker game, whatever. This marker represents your main character. Your goal is to get your marker from the center idea card to any of the edge cards. To move your marker, you have to come up with a short, one or two-sentence transition from one idea to the next.

For example, lets say you want to get from Card 1 to Card 2:

1. A living asteroid falls in love with a spaceship full of traveling colonists.
2. A teenage genius alters his own DNA to give himself superhuman strength and durability. He vows to continue making improvements until he becomes the perfect human being, but with each change, he moves farther and farther away from humanity.

Your transition could be something like, Not realizing the asteroid is alive, the teen genius puts on his space suit and jet pack and tries to knock the asteroid away from the ship.

If none of the paths across the grid inspire you, feel free to shuffle the cards and deal them out again. By the time your marker reaches the edge of the grid, you will have an outline for an original story. If you want a longer or shorter story, simply adjust the size of the grid.

You can also play the Grid Game with a friend. You each get a marker and head off in different directions, competing to reach the edge first. After the game, turn your notes into finished stories and share them with each other.

Pick a story idea and fill in some details about the conflict, protagonist, and antagonist. In the middle of your outline, fire the main character. Before they can finish their goals, kill them off, throw them in jail, injure them, or otherwise take them out of the conflict. What happens now? Who will resolve the conflict? How will you solve the central problem of the story?

Once more, start by picking a story idea. Write down a couple of sentences describing where your character is at the start of the story, and where they would like to be at the end. Next, write down a one-sentence summary of the most direct route from the start to the finish.

The most direct route is seldom the most interesting, so add some complications, a plan B, a plot twist, and a few wrenches in the works. Some people call this technique Yes, But. Every time your characters have a success, add a but that keeps the problem from being solved. The Pirate Captain finds the treasure chest, but the gold is just chocolate coins. The hunter captures the werewolf, but it escapes and runs to the local mall. The priest exorcises the demon, but it possesses his dog.

Keep rewriting this summary until you have a long and winding route to the finish. These twists and turns will keep your readers glued to the page to see what happens next.

This is a similar technique to the Scenic Route. Pick a story idea and main character. Imagine yourself as that main character trying to come up with solutions to the central problem of the story. For each possible solution, write down a pros and cons list.

Captain Rakete Logbook 7/13/2118

How do I escape this black hole before it sucks in my ship?

Set rocket engines to maximum thrust

• Pro: Possibly fastest solution
• Con: Engines could red line and burn out, could burn through all my remaining fuel

Send out distress call and wait

• Pro: Whoever came to help might be able to tow my ship to safety
• Con: Might take too long, might get sucked in before help arrives

Writing lists like these will help generate ideas for plot lines and conflicts. It will also help you understand your character better and make them feel more like a real person. If you feel like your main character is just self-insertion or an author surrogate, you can write out pros and cons lists for their decisions, decide what you would do, and then give them the motivation they need to choose a different path.

This one will take some time. Start with a story idea and a clear main character. Get into that characters head and drive them crazy. Mull over the central story problem and get paranoid. What if, while Im trying to kill the witch, her flying monkeys get me? What if Im following the road and get attacked by a lion?

You can also worry stone a piece of technology. For example, cell phones. Again writing as your main character, spend some time worrying about cell phones and thinking about anything that could go wrong with them. What if the cell phone company starts displaying our locations online where anyone could see them? What if my phones camera and microphone were on all the time? What if someone hacks my cell phone so the battery overheats and explodes? Would that kill me?