after i read through 20 of the threads you started on the front page i finish my green tea and start writing. one more to go.
My ideas come at the most random flipping times and often are an amalgam of dozen scenes/ideas that I thought of and suddenly they all click together as one whole piece.
dreams--or at least I get the best inspirations for stories from my dreams; the actual dreams themselves tend to be... unworkable. (GIANT SPACE MANATEE)
Best ideas - hard to say, I never know what will be a best idea or just meh. I usually come up with ideas when I'm watching something or reading something. Even it's junk I'm constantly contrasting my own opinion/view with what I'm seeing. Kinda like when you're tasting a new recipe and your mind is working overtime on what you'd do with it - new ingredients, new techniques. Just recently I got an idea from watching an old Snorks cartoon mainly because I was irritated that the little Smurf ripoffs were using FIRE torches under the water.
Maybe they were using magnesium torches? Now if they used an electric welder underwater I can understand your irritation.
You know all those precious ideas certain forum members keep worrying others will take? Yeah, I steal all those.
Nothing so brainy - later on they roasted marshmallows. I kept thinking of all the possibilities of what they could use but they weren't even as inventive as the Flintstones - the bee in the clamshell that could somehow trim Fred's beard.
The bar. Well, a particular bar where I'm at. Lots of warm wood, old music playing, enough people talking that you get that wash of noise where you can't single out one person's voice. I don't know why, but it helps a lot.
Mowing the lawn, or while im working on my book. If it's for graphic design, I only come up with my best ideas after my original idea has been torn to pieces. (doing a cover for the catcher in the rye... the ONE book i hated out of the bunch!)
When I'm trying to sleep, when I'm in the shower or when I'm out walking. Except when I lay in the bed, I have no chance to do something about it and by the time I get to pen and paper, my idea is gone. The other day however, I got an idea for my futuristic YA novel. The world is gone to pieces after a nuclear war and the government has monopolized wind, the last clean energy source. The hero needs to find a way to take down the government or everybody except the 1% are going to die. Still unsure about mixing in supernatural elements, but I think I'm leaning towards doing it.
I seem to get mine at the dinner table, my family isn't the most interesting when it comes to conversation! So I drift off and they pop into my head.
My best ideas seem to always come to me when I'm in the shower. I usually don't enter the shower with the plan to come up with ideas, but they just seem to pop into my head just as the water starts to wake me up.
Usually while talking to people or watching movies. Someone might tell me a story and I'll suddenly think up a weird twist on it ("I really like this girl but she has a boyfiend..." - what if you decided to make her boyfriend disappear without a trace?). With movies it's similar - a twist on the story or the character might come to me out of nowhere (kind of like how Big Lebowski is a Raymond Chandler novel but instead of a hardboiled detective you have a stoner for a protagonist).
What I do is listen to movie soundtracks (just before I go to sleep at night, passenger on a long car journey etc) and envisage my novel in the form of a film. It worked incredibly well for me. It might to do with different emotional cues in the music that cause you to view your narrative in a more sad/fearful/tense light, I'm no neurologist but it makes sense. You might want to check out "Time" by Hans Zimmer and "Mind Heist" by Zack Hemsey both from the film Inception, as well as the soundtrack from the World War Z film. "Sunshine" by John Murphy is also very good.
When I create my pocket: iPod in, turned up to a level that blocks out all other sound and people everywhere. I disappear into the chaos, knowing no one will notice me. Time suspends and I'm there. My characters are right where I left them or a new flight of fancy comes winging down, whatever the case may be.
Hey folks. I am writting a new book, and this is the 4th one that I write. The problem that I am facing now, is that I oftenly get a lot of inspiration from reading, watching TV or listening to music. I write them down in a different document, so I can browse it and use it on my book later. But the problem is that when I go back to my book, I can't organize these ideas. They all seem a lot out of context, or chronologically wrong. I feel like I have to "cut and glue" them in the story in order for them to work out. It looks like you have a lot of cool pictures in your hands, and now you must organize a puzzle in some kind of order. And I loose myself a lot in this proccess. Right now, I am trying a different approach. I just write out the ideas I have, just as they come to mind, without any kind of formatation. It all comes out very childish and etc, but at least Ican write it down. And then I will try to re-read and correct it all, writing formally. Does anyone have any other idea?
You may want to do some work off the computer. I'm not normally a very visual person, but when I have too many ideas and am having troubling figuring out a good structure, I find it useful to get a big sheet of paper and a pencil and write things down that way. Bubbles, arrows, question marks, dotted lines... whatever I need. I've also heard of people having good luck with index cards (put different ideas on different cards, maybe colour-coded, and rearrange them as needed). It's never worked for me, but I know there are people who swear by that method. There is software that tries to replicate this experience (Scrivener, etc.) but for me, there's something about actually writing on paper that activates a different part of my brain. Good luck!
When I work on novels I sometimes, temporarily, name the chapters in order to figure out where things go. In my first novel, which dealt with serial murders, I knew where each murder took place due to the titles and I could put information about them in each folder. Back in the day I was using paper, folders, and a filing cabinet. All my notes got little abbreviations so that I could put them into the right folder.