Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

This is probably the most frequently asked question of all writers, and most writers really hate it. I hated it for a long time, in part because I get too many ideas and am actually trying to find ways to get rid of them without having to write them down in novel form, which takes a long time and is emotionally difficult to carry.

But I remember when I didn't get a lot of ideas, and it felt crippling. What do you write about? You can't even begin without an idea, especially one you're passionate about. I hear people say a lot of the time, "You're so lucky" or "You're so talented. I could never be a writer." Because of the barrier of not having an idea, I think mostly. But I don't think it's true.

The main reason that people feel like they don't have ideas are:
1. They tell themselves all their ideas are bad. This happens especially to people who are taking literature classes in college or who did so in the past. It can take a long time to recover from graduate school.

2. They aren't engaging with ideas on a regular basis. I don't know about other arts, but if you're a writer, I feel strongly you need to be reading books. Every day. When you read a lot, you end up feeling like ideas are normal, and you see the pattern of how ideas are turned into stories. This is really useful. Also, you start to see how ideas are reused by different authors and changed. This is the beginning of getting your own ideas. Yep, pretty much stealing and reworking.

Sometimes people feel like they're just not good at getting ideas. It's not a terminal problem. It's like someone saying that they're not good at running downhills or uphills. Well, you know how you fix that? You do it regularly and then it's not as hard.

To many writers, getting ideas can feel like the easy part of the process. It's sitting down and writing it over days and weeks and months and years that is the hard part, and revising it so that it's better, and then all the work that goes into publication. But if you don't know where to start, the rest doesn't matter. So to get started:
1. Read.
2.Think about how you would do a scene differently.
3. Change the ending.
4.Write a chapter from another character's point of view.
5. Write a secret diary for your favorite character.
6. Make a side character into a hero for the day and see what happens.
7. Give someone a super power that was unknown before.
8. Write what happens after the book ends.
9. Write a prolog or a scene before the book begins.
10. Write a letter to an author about what should have happened at the climax and why.