Ideas are everywhere
And all you have to do to take advantage of them is pay attention, then reach out and grab them. Think about what you hear, what you read, and what you talk about. If you’re flexible enough, you can develop a good (or better) article or story idea from all of that.
The key, though, is paying attention. It’s shocking how many people don’t pay attention to what’s going on around them — whether in the physical world, in print, or online. If you do pay attention, you can quickly accumulate a pile of ideas.
What to look at
That will depend on what you’re writing. Here’s what I pay attention to:
- Conversations that I have with other writers (or just about anyone else). Sometimes, the kernel of an idea will come out of something that’s said and I can build on that.
- What I read always contains some interesting ideas. I’m not saying that I rip other writers off, but I can often come up with a tangent on something that I’ve read.
- Something I’ve written in the past. Again, there sometimes can be a tangent I can take, or I can use some of the material that I didn’t put into an article as the basis for a new one.
- Something I’ve heard can also plant the seed for an idea. I learned this from Harlan Ellison — he got the idea for one of his most poignant stories, “Jeffty is Five”, after mishearing something at a party.
Putting it into practice
Case in point: a week or so ago, a colleague at the company where I’m doing contract work returned from the printer room. He told me that someone was reading up on Adobe AIR (software for building and running Internet applications for the desktop).
I thought That’s interesting. Wonder what they’re going to do with AIR? Then, I realized what I was going to do: write an introductory article about AIR as one of the weekly tech tips that I write.
It’s not the first time this has happened, as I mentioned in a previous post. And it won’t be the last time, either.
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