The Mystery Starts Here

Rose wrote a good comment and asked where I get my ideas. What a great topic for all of us. Personally I get more ideas than I could ever write about. I clip newspaper articles, a great source. I saw a short piece on an airline crew who found a dead body on an airplane. I’m still mulling that one over. One the front page of today’s newspaper was an article about turning cremins (human cremated remains) into diamonds! There’s got to be a story there. When I watch television, ideas will pop into my head. For instance, I watched part of a program on TLC about women who marry prisoners on death row. I wrote a confession story from that idea called, “Inside/Outside Love.” Another program I saw was on women stalking women. I turned that idea into another confession story titled, “Twisted Love” and sold it to True Romance for $300.00.

Where else? Take a class in a subject that interests you or do volunteer work. I’ve always been an education junky and have taken classes for one thing or another most of my life. Because I am such an avid reader, I always wanted to do was teach adults to read. I did for two years, and got a very good article from that experience, one that I sold three times. I will talk more about slanting articles for multiple sales in a future blog. I volunteered at the Sheriff’s Department for two years and wrote a non-fiction book about my experiences (SHAMELESS PLUG!) It’s titled An Extra Pair of Eyes and is available as an e-book at www.Silverado Publishing.com. Not content with that, I went on to write a romance based on my experiences titled Call Sign: Love. My romantic suspense novel, Stormy Love, started when I was on a business trip with my husband on Amelia Island off the coast of Florida. There are some lovely old Victorian homes there and as I wandered around looking at them, I thought, what if? What it? My husband and I were in the printing business for twenty-one years and out of that experience came my humorous mystery, The Colors of Death.

Have you ever served on Jury Duty? The possibilities there are endless. Sometimes just looking at a photo or painting will spark that old, what if? Just listening to friends and hearing about their lives should spark some great ideas. One of my friends ran away and joined the circus when she was in her 40’s! Yup, I’m half-way through a mystery loosely based on her experience and it’s been great fun to write.

Still not coming up with ideas? Well, there are countless books available that were created for that purpose. I have several, even though I don’t have trouble coming up with ideas. You see, I have this little book-buying habit. I love books about writing and have, well pretty much all of them. Two of my favorite idea-generating books are: The Write-Brain Workbook by Bonnie Neubauer and The Writer’s Book of Matches, 1001 Prompts to Ignite Your Fiction by the staff of fresh boiled peanuts. Both books are excellent and fun to read and peruse. Here’s a prompt from The Book of Matches: Following the trail of several terrible murders, a London detective stumbles on an unlikely clue when he makes an impulsive visit to Stonehenge. Now, go write a story and share it with us!

Expand your experiences, keep your mind open to possibilities and you will find there are ideas to write about everywhere! Until Sunday – keep writing!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.