Tag: ideas

The Self-Aware Writer – Self-Awareness & Ideas

Posted on by Ian Dawson

You are an endless supply of ideas and stories.  You’ve lived life, have had good and bad experiences, and have grown from those situations.  How you interpret what’s happened to you can influence how you react in future situations, and this self-awareness and hindsight can help you create and develop stories.

Creating grounded characters and situations that others can relate to is a way to utilize self-awareness as a writer.  This is where your internal self-awareness comes into play by exploring and analyzing real-world events and emotions from your own life.  You can discover relatable moments that readers can connect to that will keep them glued to the page. 

The key phrase here is connection.  You aim to create characters that allow the audience to empathize and sympathize with them and their struggles or triumphs.  Even in fantasy stories, we are drawn to characters who have relatable emotions, goals, and setbacks.  While we all may not go on a journey like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, our Hobbit hero’s emotional arc allows us humans to relate and connect with him.

This week, take the time to sit and write down five or six events from your life that could be the inciting incident of a new story.  Take yourself back to those moments.  What was going through your mind at the time?  Feelings?  Thoughts?  What was your emotional journey through each of your chosen events?

These don’t have to be tragic; you can also utilize positive moments.  The key is to explore the realness of each situation.  How can those emotional beats be part of your protagonist’s larger character arc?  How would an audience empathize or sympathize with your character?

Only some ideas will hit, and only some life events are worthy of being committed to paper.  As you develop a keener self-awareness as a writer, you’ll gain perspective on when an idea isn’t worth pursuing over one that is.  

It’s all part of the creative process, the ability to prioritize ideas worth your time, effort, and energy over those that aren’t right now.

By digging into your life and past, you can mine stories that aren’t carbon copies of the latest bestseller or Hollywood blockbuster.

Once your story idea and characters are locked in, you can take the following steps: development and drafting.  We’ll talk about those in the next post.

Happy Creating, and I’ll see you next time!

Writing Tip: Ideas in Action

Posted on by Ian Dawson

Ideas.  We all have them.  Billions of people all around the planet have ideas every day.  Some good.  Some bad.  Some brilliant.  Some ridiculous.  From kids to the elderly, ideas are racing through the minds of people 24/7.  But what are they doing with them?

A coworker of mine used to pitch me several game show ideas a week.  And every time, I would tell him to write them down.  He never did.  Just kept coming up with them week after week.  But what if he had written them down?  What if one of them had actually been an idea worth exploring further?

If you think of an idea, write it down.  You can use a notebook, the Notes app on your phone, or a computer file.  Sounds simple enough.  But most people don’t take the time to do this.

And they need to.

There are tens of millions of creative people out there. Still, most don’t take the time to write down their ideas and cultivate the good ones into possible stories.

Having an idea is easy.  Building on an idea is the hard part.

Good ideas deserve action.  If you have a story idea that intrigues you, something that makes you pause and wonder what happens next, this is the time to act and get to work.  The biggest mistake is to let the idea dissolve into memory, only to be forgotten and never expanded upon.

Sit down and take the time to brainstorm and hash out the idea’s finer points and details.  Possible characters, conflicts, locations.  How the story begins.  How it ends.  Is there something compelling for you to continue the journey to make it more than an simple idea?

If so, continue.  If not, move on but don’t throw any of those notes away.  You never know when something from one idea could be merged into another.  It happens.

An idea is actionable when you decide for it to be.  No one can stop you from developing what you’ve thought of into a more dimensional creative work.

The ideas start and stop with you.  It is your choice what to do with them.  

Choose action.  

Happy writing, and I’ll see you next week!

The 3 a.m. Idea

Posted on by Ian Dawson

If you’re a writer or other type of creative person, you’ve been there.  It’s 3 a.m.  You’re asleep.  It’s quiet. And then…your brain decides to wake up and start working on your project.  And boom!  Your eyelids fly open like window shades, and your mind goes into overdrive as you start connecting the dots and creating the most elaborate, award-winning scene ever created for audiences.

But you’ll remember it tomorrow morning when you wake up.  And you go back to bed.

Morning.  The sun is up.  You’re up.  And what was that f**king brilliant idea you had last night??!!???

Yep.  It happens to all of us.  Sometimes more than once.  After a few times of it happening, it’s best to give into the creative impulse and WRITE THE IDEA DOWN!  Keep a legal pad or notebook by the bed.  Or, if you have horrifically illegible handwriting when you write fast like I do, type it out in the Notes page on your phone or use your computer.

Best case scenario: you saved a brilliantly creative idea from being washed away in the night.

Worst case scenario: you read it the next morning, realize the idea is crap, and delete or scratch it out.

Either way, it’s available for you to make that decision the next day.

Think it.  Write it.  Save it. Your creative sanity will thank you later.