FOR DISCOVERY WRITERS: Building Your Novel: STEP 2, The Best Tips for Gathering Ideas and Inspiration When You're Not An Outliner

 Building Your Novel: STEP 2, The Best Tips for Gathering Ideas and Inspiration

How to gather ideas for a novel

So you’ve decided to take the leap. Good for you. Now, what are you going to write about?

Ideas are everywhere. That’s both the good news and the bad news. The trick isn’t finding ideas—it’s recognizing which ones you can build into a novel. A lot of that depends on you.

Let me be clear: you don’t need the perfect idea to start writing. What you need is something that excites you. Something that you can develop into a long story from, likely, several stories. Main plot, subplots, plots within plots.

For discovery writers, the best ideas aren’t fully formed plots. They’re questions. Provocations. “What if” scenarios. What if the chosen antichrist doesn’t want to be the antichrist? Begin with the actual words “What if” and try to complete the sentence.

Inspiration tips For Discovery Writers

If you’re struggling with getting started, you might try making a list of What ifs. Brainstorming like this usually works best if you make your list quickly without thinking about it too much. Come up with ten or twenty or thirty what-if scenarios. Think of people or places or themes. Or maybe you just come up with three or four, and that’s all you can get. Fine. You just need one.

Sometimes going for a walk or taking a shower or bath is a good place to get ideas.  Let your subconscious work. It works for me anyway. Baths especially, for some reason. I don’t advise idea hunting while you’re driving or operating other large machinery.

How do you know if an idea has novel potential? For me, it’s when it starts growing on its own. I’ll jot down something simple. A sixty-year-old man finds out he was adopted. If your mind keeps returning to an idea, expanding it, explaining it, and certain plot points come to you, then you know you’re on to something. A sixty-year-old man finds out he was adopted when his parents both die. A sixty-year-old man finds out he was adopted when his parents both die while he is going through his second divorce. I start to see a plot. He keeps failing in relationships. He links this to his being adopted. Yes, he’s a bit old for a midlife crisis, but everyone keeps telling him sixty is the new forty. Did he miss his midlife crisis? Would it be all right for him to have it now? Etc., etc., I just keep playing with the idea.

Don’t overthink this stage. Collecting ideas should be playful, not analytical. The critical brain is useful later, but right now, it’s the creative brain you want to use.

Here are some ways I gather materials without suffocating them with structure:

Snapshots: Quick descriptions of scenes I can vividly imagine, even if I don’t know where they fit in a larger story.

Character sketches: Not detailed biographies, just impressions. “A man who can’t remember people’s names suddenly remembers everyone’s name.” “A librarian who works in a haunted library.”

Setting fragments: Places that feel charged with story potential. An abandoned amusement park where the rides still move at night and seems populated by people even though the town has only a few hundred residents. Where did these people come from? What is going on in the park?

Tensions: Basic conflicts that intrigue me. Two brothers who haven’t spoken in twenty years are forced to run their father’s business together.

Notice, none of these are plots. They’re seeds, not blueprints. Seeds are fine. You’re going to learn how to grow these plots as you discover each new aspect of your story. What matters is capturing ideas in their raw state, before your inner critic can tear them apart.

When an idea really grabs you—when it won’t let you go—that’s when you know you’ve found something worth exploring. It doesn’t need to be original. It needs to be yours. It needs to be something you care enough about to spend months wrestling with.

I’ve started novels with nothing more than a character’s voice in my head. One book began because I couldn’t stop thinking about a particular beach town in winter. Another grew from a single line of dialogue I overheard at a coffee shop.

If you’re struggling to find that spark, here’s another exercise to try: Write down ten things that make you angry. Ten things that break your heart. Ten things you don’t understand but wish you did. Maybe you’ll find seeds for a novel in this way.

Remember: at this stage, quantity beats quality. Collect widely, indiscriminately. The sorting happens later.

And here’s a truth that might free you: you don’t need to have THE idea before you start. Many discovery writers begin with a vague notion and discover their real story through the act of writing. The first idea is just a way into the journey of writing a novel.

Keep your idea collection somewhere you can access easily. Review it regularly. Let ideas cross-pollinate. Sometimes the magic happens when two unrelated concepts collide. This often happens to me. I have an idea and a second idea that doesn’t seem to go with the first works into the story. I work on figuring out ways they might work together in the same story. It’s fun. It’s challenging. Sometimes the friction of the ideas can create sparks. Sparks are usually good.

The materials you gather now don’t need to make a coherent whole. They’re just possibilities. Potential. They’re the pile of lumber, bricks, and tools in the yard before construction begins.

Your job isn’t to see the finished house yet. You can’t. Your job is to collect interesting building materials and trust that, when the time comes, you’ll figure out how they fit together.

Next time doubt creeps in, remember that every great novel started as a fragile idea in someone’s mind. Every masterpiece began as a messy collection of possibilities.

Gather your materials. Be generous with yourself. Get ready to build.

My amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Brian-Yansky/author/B001H6UHHW?ref