How to Know a Story Idea When You See One
It looks like a duck; it quacks like a duck; it must be a duck
Sometimes I think my superpower is coming up with story ideas. It’s an undervalued component of being a writer, which is quite an irony since you can’t write unless you have an idea of what you want to write about.
When I got my first writing job, right out of college, I assumed I’d be told what to write. After all, being a student means being assigned a topic. So when my first editor at that first job asked me what I planned to do for my first story, I froze. No one had ever taught me how to think of a story idea, or advised me on what made for a good story, or told me how to find one.
The usual wisdom is “write what you know”, but that puzzled me: Why write what I know when there’s so much I don’t yet know that I’d like to know? Why not choose to write the stories I’d want to read? It would be a steeper climb, for sure, starting with no knowledge, but I was willing to do it.
But what makes a good story? It can’t merely be a topic (ie, orchids). There has to be some question being begged or it will read like a term paper. It can certainly be a person — though it helps if there is a question there, too, to make it more than a bio. It can be something strange or it can be something very…
