A few things have happened recently that point to a small problem aspiring authors seem to have. If you haven’t figured it out yet from the title, then here are three examples as illustrations:

• At a recent book signing by David Joy, one of the guests (inevitably, I think) asked Joy how he came up with ideas for his stories and whether finding ideas was a problem.
• Not long ago, a reader with in-depth subject knowledge emailed me with intricately formed ideas for a series of Romances based on the Fae as a suggestion for a new series for me to write. (As a side note, I appreciated the discussion, not least because I value my readers’ time and appreciated the outreach. Don’t let the following diminish that sense of appreciation.)
• Finally, on a Facebook group for authors, of which I am a member, an author working on his first book stated flat out that he couldn’t write in series because he just didn’t have the ideas for any books. Not any books that would be part of a series, but any more books period.

My editor likes to joke that if I ran out of ideas today, I could write for the rest of my life on the ones I already have written down.

Is He Right?

I was curious as to whether or not he was right, so today, I sat down and tallied up all my story ideas, divided them out among my four current pen names, plus literary fiction that belongs under none of the above, and assigned a best-guess estimate for final word count.

I’ve been writing fiction for a while now and have a decent feel for story length, so the finished word counts of each novel are probably accurate to within ten thousand words. Assigning values for short stories was a little trickier, as those range anywhere from a couple hundred words up to twenty thousand. I decided four thousand words a story was sufficient.

My total for the current works-in-progress and stories waiting to be written? Six million, nine hundred and sixty-eight thousand words. If you need a number, here it is: 6,968,000,000.

Yeah, I kinda boggled at that one, too. Bear in mind that I deliberately left a few things out (the Rose Red stories, for example, since I don’t have a rough plan for them, and all non-fiction, including this blog) and also deliberately underestimated the finished length of the sixteen (!) short stories in various stages of being written.

I hit the million-words-written mark around fifteen months after I started writing fiction. Since I’ve been on a bit of a writing roller coaster over the past couple of years (meaning my output varies wildly), that’s not exactly a great benchmark to judge by, so let me give you a better one.

If I wrote 3,000 words a day (a reasonable amount by any standard) for five days a week over fifty weeks of the year, I would write seven hundred and fifty thousand words. That’s 3,000 x 5 x 50 = 750,000.

Divide the potential words above (almost seven million) by three-quarters of a million words per year, and it would take me more than nine years to write all the stories for which I currently have ideas.

Unless I get hit by a bus at the grand old age of fifty-eight, I still have at least another decade or two to write beyond that. Sorry, Richard, but I only have one-third of the ideas I’ll need to last me the rest of my life.

Ideas and the Average Writer

Now, I feel like I’m a typical professional writer, or at least that the average writer follows Orson Scott Card’s maxim. To paraphrase, everyone walks by a thousand story ideas every day. Most people miss them completely. Good writers can spot a few.

Good writers don’t run out of ideas. To bring it around full circle, ideas aren’t the problem; they’re a dime a dozen. The real problem is finding the time to work on them, and that’s where most writers hit a wall.

I’m not saying writers don’t hit idea walls. We do it all the time. Characters don’t cooperate, plots develop inconvenient and seemingly unfixable holes, story worlds crumble under logical inconsistencies.

And sometimes, we hit mental walls where we flinch from the creation or cultivation of new ideas. I’ve been doing that a lot lately, but I also know why: I’m stressed out, have too many stories in progress already, and too many ideas waiting for me to write them. I’m overwhelmed with ideas. Right now, I don’t need any more. What I really need is uninterrupted, dedicated writing time. Just think of all the lovely words waiting to be born, if I more faithfully applied fingers to keyboard!

Generating Ideas

For those of you whose idea factory is well and truly stumped, here are a few ideas to grease the wheels, sand off the rust, and get the machinery up and running again.

First, actively observe your surroundings and ask what if?

• What if scientists experimented on a janitor with a low IQ, causing it to soar? How would that affect the janitor and the people around him? Could his IQ be sustained, or would it cause damage to his psyche? (Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes)
• What if the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood was really a werewolf who killed Red’s parents, sending her on a quest for revenge? (Aha! This is “Red,” one of my short stories.)
• What if humanity evolved to the point that inter-human violence was completely eliminated, not long before a hostile alien species attacked? Who would humans turn to to help them, when they had so outpaced their own aggression? (“Ploughshares” by M.W. Keiper)

And so on.

My favorite thing to do is to take a situation and add a twist.

• The world needs stronger female protagonists? Ok, how about immortal warriors descended from the women on which the Amazons of Greek myth were derived? (Daughters of the People)
• The destruction of Atlantis results in…what? Humans staying on Earth? Pshaw, I can do better than that. How about, humans flee a crumbling civilization and spread out across the galaxy, developing a variety of cultures while battling and/or befriending alien species? (The Pruxnae)
• Vampires in Atlanta? I’ll give you one better… (The Vampyr)

But it all starts with what if? Go ahead. Give it a whirl and see what you come up with.

Ok, what if didn’t work for you? Try falling into a hypnogogic state, that space between dreams and wakefulness where ideas practically teem. Some of my best ideas (for stories, scenes, characters, or what have you) come about when I’ve just woken and am still in bed, allowing my mind to drift aimlessly. This morning (ok, afternoon; night owl here), I riffed on two existing ideas and envisioned a third one, all without any physical effort whatsoever.

If all else fails, then fall back on something every writer should be doing anyway: Read a book.

Not just any book, either. Read something outside your usual genres. If you normally read Nora Roberts, read 14 by Peter Clines. Is Science Fiction your thing? Flip it around and try some Fantasy. Shake your reading habits up a bit and see what you come up with.

Don’t just stick to fiction, either. Non-fiction is an excellent way to generate ideas. I’ve got a stack of science articles tucked away for exactly that purpose, and you should see my non-fiction TBR book pile. It contains everything from history to biographies to survivalist manuals to psychology to… Well, it’s an incredibly varied stack of books. I don’t read non-fiction as fast as I read fiction. In fact, I tend to read two or three non-fiction books at any one time, just so I don’t burn out on a subject. But that’s me.

What Are You Waiting For?

No, seriously. Not having an idea is about the lamest excuse any writer has to avoid writing. Ideas are literally everywhere. You just have to be open to the possibilities, and if you can’t find them, you may have a deeper problem you need to search out and fix before you can write again.