How To Have More Creative Writing Ideas Than You Thought Possible

Ever feel like you could be a much better writer if only you had more ideas? Do you sometimes struggle to have ANY ideas, let alone any good ones? Then here are your 7 steps to having more creative writing ideas than you thought possible:

1. Open yourself to having ideas. If you don’t believe you’re capable of having ideas, then you won’t have them--it’s as simple as that. In fact, ideas are all around you, being transmitted from a radio station that never stops. When you accept this, and open yourself to this concept, you’ll find yourself tuning into Radio IDEAS FM far more frequently.
2. Use an Ideas Journal. This is fundamental to being able to have a steady flow of ideas. What usually happens is not that you don’t have any ideas, it’s that you don’t record them, and you forget them. So it feels like you don’t have any ideas in the first place. An Ideas Journal is just a notebook you keep with you wherever you go and jot down your ideas as they come to you. Before you forget them.
3. Read as widely and as often as possible. When you read, you can absorb ideas on two levels. First, in the content of what you read, the topic it’s about. The second level is the style and the techniques being used. What does the writer do to keep you engaged, excited or moved? Think about how you can adapt both of these levels to give you more ideas for your own writing.
4. Ask “If I could have all the ideas I ever needed, what would that look like?”. Often we crave something without actually thinking about what it will be like when we have it. So even if we’re already well on the way to reaching it, we don’t recognize it! When you ask what it would be like to have all the ideas you need, you’ll find a) it’s far fewer ideas than you think and b) you’re already far closer to that ideal than you realized!
5. Be curious about how you can be inspired. When you have the attitude of being curious, ideas come far more easily. Another way of looking at this is to ask, “How can this inspire an idea for my creative writing?” wherever you are, whatever situation you’re in and whoever is around you. Then jot down what comes to you before you forget.
6. Divide and multiply existing ideas. Once you have a few ideas, there’s lots of scope for developing more. There are two approaches. First, you can take one idea and divide it into smaller components. Then look at all the ways you could develop each. Or you can take two or more unconnected ideas, throw them together and generate new ideas in various combinations. If these two ideas were parents, what kind of children would they have?
7. Let your ideas develop naturally. You’ll find that as soon as you start capturing your ideas, they’ll incubate and grow. When you return and read an idea, you’ll instantly come up with connections in your creative mind as to how the idea could develop. Let the ideas flow naturally, don’t try to crowbar them into an existing piece of writing if they don’t fit--you’ll just end up being frustrated and potentially wasting a great idea.

Follow these 7 tips to have more creative writing ideas than you thought possible.