I woke up one morning a few months ago with an idea for a story. As it has happened before, I had a shadow of an idea from a dream I had. I went about my morning and watched our church service on my computer since someone was sick and we were staying home. I didn’t give a ton of thought to the story, yet.
As I listened to the sermon, I was challenged to pray a big prayer. A prayer bigger than I had ever dared to pray. I prayed it… and moved on with my day.
It happened again… I thought I was pretty solid in my ideas and my plan for my books… but then I got a new idea… Really, another one?
After I wrote my first full book, Not Alone, I decided that it would be the first book in a series. Immediately I knew the series would be three books. I had three characters that needed their stories to be told. It took me a few years to get to writing the third book. I had a baby and my brain turns to mush when I’m pregnant, so writing took a backseat for a while. But when E was a little over a year old I was finally able to fully jump back in the saddle and start writing again (I had been doing some heavy duty editing of book one). But as I started flushing out what I was going to write in book three another idea came to me.
Where’d the idea come from?
Many people as writers, “Where do you get your story ideas?”
But some days I’m like, “How do you not have ideas?” 🙂
If I had time to write all my ideas I think I could fill an entire library!
Most of my ideas are inspired from something else.
Other stories work as a type of spring board for my ideas. I’ll watch a show or read a book and a little piece of a character or storyline will jump out at me, and I’ll follow it down a little bunny trail. Or I’ll see a news article, and the same thing happens. Sometimes the idea comes out of seemingly nowhere. Sometimes the story idea will even come out of a dream I have. I’ll play the scene or character out in my head and see where it takes me. If I find something worth pursuing, I’ll write the idea down. I use Evernote a lot for this since I can just turn on my phone and type up a new note. I also have a binder that holds all my ideas and notes until they can take on a life of their own, but I’m using Evernote more and more since it syncs with my computer, and I can just copy and paste into my writing program. Read More