Brandon Sanderson is the bestselling author of the Mistborn series. He was a lecturer who taught Sci fi and fantasy writing at Brigham Young University. His 2020 lecture series are available for free on Youtube. He has earned my respect in more ways than one and is one of my mentors for a reason. In one of his lecture videos, he said something that is now a platitude, “ideas are cheap”.
When I first heard from Sanderson that ideas are cheap, my instinct was to shake my head and scoff. It’s easy for you, I thought, you’ve already published several books and have written even more. Of course you would say that ideas are overrated and cheap. When most writers who get stuck or blocked are lost for ideas, here is a successful author saying that ideas are cheap. Come back to earth! However, the more I listened to Sanderson and the more I myself wrote my own stories, the more I understood what he meant.
As an author, we must be able to be able to see ideas from everything and everything. Ideas are in fact, everywhere. They are like butterflies and we each have a net that we must use to capture them. With the current story that I’m writing on, I have drawn on prompts from various sources to use as building blocks for my story. These prompts have elevated my story so that it transcends beyond “just a story” but it can be a story that speaks to the universal themes and experiences of being human. A writer, particularly a gardener-type writer who does not rely on planning, may get away with starting a story from one idea, because as he writes, he will naturally expand on and add more ideas. However, many half-baked novels have risen due to writers starting on such an expedition without properly thinking through the various hooks and themes of their novel. While it is okay to be a Gardener-type writer, it remains important to have a strong foundation for your story and the ability to come up with a range of ideas on which to draw from.
Now it is your turn to share with us your own experience in this area. Describe a time when you worked on your story and ran out of ideas. How did you solve this problem? Were you able to continue your story or did you find a better one to tell? Let us know in the comments below.