You’re in the examination.  Your pen is full of ink, you’ve chosen your title, and the clock is ticking.  You look around you – everyone is writing already!  Oh no!

How can you come up with ideas on the spot?  After all, you can’t take your journal into the exam, and you won’t have a teacher to ask for help.  Panic!

The strategies in this section may help you to overcome your panic and let the ideas run free.

One of the best ways to come up with an idea is to brainstorm a title.

Take your chosen title and write it at the top of your page. Then draw a pretty cloud around it – and switch off your brain.  I’m serious – switch it off.  Focus on the title.  Let that mass of half-remembered thousand books, films, television programmes and adverts seep out of the corners of your mind memory. Write down everything and everything you can think of.

Some of your ideas will be wild; some will be clichéd; some will be downright silly.  Who cares?  How daft is the idea of a little dwarf-thing (called a hobbit) having to chuck a magic ring into a volcano to save the world?  Most of us would have thought this was a terrible idea, but it became ‘Lord of the Rings’!
         
Personally, I find it easier to think about who is in my story before I worry about what is going to happen to them.  There’s a good reason for this: if you know your main character is an superhero, or a goat, then you’ve already got a good idea to how they’d try to escape from somewhere!

An idea isn’t a plan – you need to develop ‘story sparks’ into full plans!

(c) Nick Hitchen 2007

Last updated on August 13, 2007