Rainbolt Bethany - The writers idea thesaurus : an interactive guide for developing ideas for novels and short stories

WritersDigest. com
Cincinnati, Ohio

For Philip and Marion Weyna, with love and admiration.

Words are all around us, but when were searching for a precise word, we consult a thesaurus (like Rogets) to find it. Ideas are all around us too, ideas with the potential to become stories and novels, gazillions of ideasmore than enough for every aspiring and veteran writer on the planet. However, that doesnt mean theyre easy to identify or to anatomize for their story potential. Sometimes we have just the grain of an idea but need a push to expand it to full form. This is why writers also need an idea thesaurus, a central clearinghouse for ideas, you might saynot unlike that imaginary clearinghouse in Schenectady that Harlan Ellison once humorously referred to in response to the question, Where do you get your ideas?

Until now, however, such a reference work has not existed. Yes, there are books of prompts on the market, but not story situations, which is what The Writers Idea Thesaurus provides. These situations are organized by subject matter (twenty subjects in all), divided into ten more specific categories, with ten even more specific situations in each category. Lets take a look at how it works.

Let me first assure you that I did not extract any of these scenarios from existing works, not even from my own. Instead I mined my notebooksmany dozens of them, which Ive kept over the years and have stored in a large box in my study. If I had transformed all of these ideas into finished works, Id probably be the most prolific author in the world. You see, Im a teacher of writing (now retired) and I enjoy talking about ways to conjure up and work with ideas as much as I do turning ideas into stories. Indeed, in my previous book, Where Do You Get Your Ideas? A Writers Guide to Transforming Notions Into Narratives, I discuss the art of idea conjuring and offer a step-by-step approach to shaping those conjured-up ideas into marketable stories.

Ideas come to me continually, morning and night, even when I dont particularly want them to come, such as when Im driving, cooking, trying to sleep (I often get up in the middle of the night to jot down ideas), or even getting together with friends, when jotting down ideas is awkward, if not downright rude. Even so, I am never without at least a pocket notebook so I can make surreptitious jottings. The Writers Idea Thesaurus represents a carefully screened and finessed selection of the countless ideas Ive conjured up over the years, along with new ideas that continue to stream through my head. By the way, I encourage you to develop this notebook habit too! Ideas have a way of begetting more ideas.

In addition to flicking randomly through The Writers Idea Thesaurus and chancing upon one story situation or another (which can be fun), you might try the following systematic approach.

First, review the Table of Contents to see how the twenty chapters and the ten idea categories under each chapter are organized. Notice that chapters are presented in alphabetical order for easy reference. Flip to an interesting chapter and category and peruse the ten story situations under each categoryten story scenarios for each of the ten idea categories in each of the twenty subjects (chapters)two thousand story situations in all, enough to keep you swimming in story or novel ideas for a very long time. The breakdown looks a little like this:

SITUATION 1: A rowboat containing a skull washes onto the coast of Spain. Accompanying the skull is a parchment containing a prophecy: Whoever finds the skull must return it to the family of the deceased, or the finders will suffer calamity. Alas, the curse is not taken seriously.

After looking at this example above, some writers might wonder whether Im offering up too much information or infringing on ones creativity. No, and no. A sourcebook of general story ideas such as this can actually spark creativity, especially when prompted to take those general ideas and spin them in unique ways to create something new, as well see below.

Lets take a look at four specific methods you can use to personalize these situations.

This method uses the situation you settle on as point A and relies upon your imagination to propel the idea into a full-fledged story. Lets imagine that youre itching to write a thriller about the search for a hidden bomb. will be the chapter for you. Go there and survey the ten categories in that chapter and find the category that comes closest to the kind of search story youd like to write. Lets say you choose Category 10: The Search for a Weapon. As with all the other idea categories, this one lists ten story situations specific to searching for weapons for you to choose from. You may finally decide on Situation 2:

A scientist with top secret information about a new military weapon vanishes. It is up to the protagonista CIA agentto find her. The problem is that the scientist and the CIA agent once worked together, and each knows incriminating things about the other.

This is just the starting point, and there are many ways to approach a story idea such as this based on your own creative intuition, plucked randomly from your own creative juices. Here are three such higher-level changes you may choose to make:

• The scientist and the CIA agent have become double agents, but neither knows of the others allegiance.
• It is later revealed that they were once lovers.
• The scientist has been kidnapped by a terrorist groupbut the alleged secret weapon she is supposed to know about does not exist. The terrorists do not believe her and threaten to kill her. It is up to the CIA agent to find her in time.

You may likely come up with a dozen different ways to change the story. No matter what you choose, the goal here is to take this starting point and run with it into new directions that no other author might ever think of. Think big. Think unique.

Of course there are many other ways to manipulate a story, namely, dig into the details and change them around. Instead of making major plot changes, you can simply set the situation we noted in a specific decade. Spies in the 1950s worried about very different things than spies do now, and each kind of spy has access to different clothing styles, slang, weapons, cars, etc. Genders and roles may be swapped. Maybe the scientist and CIA agent arent lovers but mother and son. Or brother and sister. Or you might change the location. Perhaps the story takes place in Eastern Europe, or California, or Antarctica.