How do ideas comes to you and what do you so when you have thought of something fantastic to write? Ideas come to me at the most random moments. I could be sitting down and watching television and all of a sudden I will literally stand up (most of the time I jump up) and immediately grab my notebook and start writing. Are you actively thinking of ideas that may turn you into the next JK Rowling or do you passively go about your life and then suddenly something pops into your head? I just go by normal life, and ideas just hit me out of nowhere. Do you just go about your life looking at different situations and imagining what could be? Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Once you get an idea, immediately what do you do? Do you open up a spreadsheet document and jot down what came into your head? Or once you have an idea in your head are you instantly consumed and considering the minute details of your epiphany? Once I get an idea, I immediately grab my notebook and jot everything down, as I mentioned above.
I am partially insulted! But really, OP, inspiration comes from lotsa things. Finding it isn't too hard either - open your eyes wider!
Sometimes I can not seriously remember where I got the inspiration from. Sometimes, it feels like I just got it from my imagination.
Sometimes it's the spur-of-the-moment thing too. Like, when I'm just doing an activity that has nothing to do with my novel, and something is triggered and I have an idea. It is rather strange, but I love the feeling when an idea comes to you, but it is foggy and unclear but you want to expand on it further. And then, unless you write it down, when you wake up the next day, you'll probably forget some of the minute details that could tie the whole thing together. I HATE when that happens!!
Ideas mostly come to me from People. But there's plenty of other reasons why i get the ideas i get. One idea i just got from a commercial..
Ideas don't usually just come to me out of the blue. I have to go out and track them down. I've mentioned this before somewhere on this forum: One good source of inspiration for me is a book of photographs, or maybe a magazine with great photography, like National Geographic. I just page through, looking at pictures, until something looks really interesting. A picture of a face - what kind of character could that be? What is his or her life like? Or a picture of people in a situation I don't normally get into myself - a jungle village, a fishing boat, a research laboratory, a military camp. These help trigger my imagination. I start wondering what these people are like, what they're doing, what problems they face, what their struggle is like. Lots of stories come out of pictures. But sometimes I can just gather threads out of daydreams. A character here, a setting there, a situation ... and over time, all that gels into an idea for a story.
My ideas come from a combination of dreams, and from those "what if" questions I ask myself on a day-to-day basis. I slowly try to narrow down broad ideas into workable plots.
hi I have just been reading your message from a while ago did you ever remember what your dream story was about? Plus I have a dream journal i carry around with me and one under my pillow just in case so i can write it down without loosing it. hope this may help. sorry if someone already wrote this advice
Notebooks are great, until you go back and re-read the stuff you wrote right after waking up. For instance, I wrote down a story from a dream I had about a volleyball hero playing for THE world tournament inside of the Pyramids of Giza. He had to compete not only for the medal and himself, but for the love of the head cheerleader. His main rival was a Laotian named Samual. The game was interrupted when aliens blew open the pyramids with rockets and took everyone away to be anally probed. A sleeping mind does not have very good taste. But otherwise, it's a great idea.
I am hesitant to post any of my work because my wife told me that anything I put on these forums can be stolen by someone else because there's no copyright. I really would like to develop my stories with fellow writers, but I'm afraid of getting my ideas stolen. How do I fix this? What can I do to protect my intellectual properties? I will say that my story ideas allow for other authors to "run with it" in my 'verse, but certain laws and concepts MUST remain intact. Help?
You can't really protect ideas. I wouldn't post them in detail, though the likelihood of them being stolen is probably slim. Any actual writing that you post here is already protected by copyright, assuming it is more than just a short snippet.
Others will have much better responses for this question, but from what I've seen on here I can say the following. Don't post an entire story unless you want to lose the ability to have it published for any sort of profit. You can post an excerpt in the writer's workshop threads to collaborate with others on here/get constructive critiques, but you must first read through all the guidelines for submitting there and critique two other people's work first. You should browse the threads in the section I linked below. https://www.writingforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=71 Also, if you are talking about just posting ideas here, there isn't really anything to protect an idea. If someone were to steal elements of your idea, what they did with it, would be their own in the end. Until you turn your idea into a completed story, I don't believe there is anything protecting it. That said, the people on here are rich with their own ideas, and generally come on here to help and collaborate rather than steal from each other. I wouldn't worry about it.
As Cogito is fond of saying, there are no completely original ideas - it's all been done before. What is important is how well you develop your idea into a story that's worth reading. That said, I'm not a big fan of developing story ideas with other writers. When I start on an idea, I usually know where I want to go with it and what I want to accomplish, and I tend to treat each one as intensely personal. If I share anything with other writers - and I do, sometimes - it's to get an objective opinion on how a passage works or how an idea is developing; the tactical side of writing rather than the strategic side. But that's just me.
Hi, Like the others I wouldn't worry too much about your story idea being stolen. Even if someone was that way inclined, it would take surely at least six months to turn it into a novel so if nothing else you've got time. But equally, there are very few truly original story ideas, and the chances are that your story borrows from other writers, as in the future others will borrow from you if your story becomes successful. Cheers.
There's a few options if you're truly worried. But I would only suggest these if you've actually written something significant (like, the whole novel.) Option 1) Register it with the WGA West registry, located here: https://www.wgawregistry.org/webrss/dataentry.asp -- it's not too expensive and it's on file and dated so if somewhere were to steal your stuff, you have proof it's yours (I would only suggest this if you have a completed manuscript. Option 2) Print it out and mail it yourself. It's the old school way of copyrighting. The date stamped on the unopened package is proof of ownership should the need arise. Final thought: ideas are meant to be shared and debated. Stories are worth protecting.
I won't trust an idea not to be stolen. It's just the world we live in, sad to say. If I have to, I would find a coupla people I want to take a risk on and run the idea past them individually then make my own conclusions.
I'd just post short excerpts of any writing, especially something you have ambitions to publish. If it's part of a first draft, by the time it's been polished, it should read much differently anyway. As for ideas, again you can just post anything you want feedback on, and not an outline of the whole story. I would hope no one would nick an idea, but I guess you never know. Even if they did, their version would be entirely different than yours. I wouldn't worry too much.
mikey... option 2 is useless in the us, having no legal standing in courts here, though it may have some in the uk... look up 'poor man's copyright' at the source [ www.copyright.gov ] and you'll see... and in any case, ideas can't be 'owned' or copyrighted... plus, there are countless cases where more than one writer had the same idea at nearly the same time and turned out books or movies that were practically clones of each other... merlin... no two writers will turn out the same story/book/movie from the same 'idea'... so even if someone should use yours, the final product won't be anything like yours...
It's a good idea for any writer to have a basic understanding of copyright law. In the US, copyright is protected by federal statute (Title 17, U.S. Code). Federal copyright law was completely re-written in 1976, and subsequently modified in by an international treaty, called the Berne Convention, in 1989. The reason this is important is that these two laws preempted and replaced all other laws and forms of copyright protection in the US. There is a great deal of incorrect information on the internet based on prior law. The US Copyright Office has a series of circulars in PDF format which explain all of the basics in layman's terms. Circular 1, Copyright Basics, will tell you most of what you need to know. It can be found here: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf. Additional information is available in other circulars on their website. Under current US law, copyright protection extends automatically to all "original works of authorship". You are not required to register with the Copyright Office or include any form of copyright notice in the work itself, although it's a good idea to do so when the work is published in final form.
