Eight easy and fast ways to come up with new stories
I will present in this article a brief list of excellent ways to produce amusing and creative ideas quickly and easily. These list of methods to produce ideas for your writings are based on the work done during live workshops, where they have shown their effectiveness
To create a story, as these imaginative stories for children, you just need a message to communicate, along with the setting and characters. What I didn’t go into in previous articles was how to come up with that basic situation and characters; and how to make them fun and creative.
Here you will find some ways to helpensure that a lack of imagination and creativity will no longer be a valid obstacle to producing a great story:
UNEXPECTED ASSOCIATIONS
Let your imagination discover what could be the link between two completely different words with no clear association. Car-Wheel is not an illogical association, but Car-Spinach certainly is. How about a car that runs on spinach instead of petrol? A driver’s struggle to get petrol stations to sell vegetables… that’s our story already almost done.
2.- WHAT IF…
Grab a character just to convert him/her into anything else. For example, a dog that turns into a sock. No doubt, you are already imagining a boy telling his family that his sock snuffles and licks his feet. As you can see, the more illogical the associations, the more bizarre and entertaining the story.
Produce new names for something completely new
Prefixes and sufixes result in unexpected objects. What is an “antitomato”? And a “multipet”, or a “minicoin”? When trying to imaginate an object with such a name, our brain will work to give the object an appropiate set of crazy characteristics. Prefixes you can use include: a, anti, dis, bi, tri, co, hyper, multi, semi, super, micro, mini, maxi, etc.
4.- IMPOSSIBLE CONTRAPTIONS
Kids certainly like all short of machines making strange things. For example, imagine there’s a special machine for tucking children in and kissing them goodnight; and the machine breaks down throughout the world. All parents would then have to relearn how to do that themselves. Or that, one day, the hairstyle machine wakes up unusually happy, and sets to work styling the little hairs on mummy and daddy’s goose-pimples.
MODIFIED CLASSIC TALES
It can be useful to modify a classic story just to make a new one. It is enough to add, remove or change any character or small detail.
How about if Snow White’s stepmother doesn’t find the mirror? We can also modify time and place? Or we could change time and place. So Cinderella throws in her job as a cleaner for the metro system, and takes a dream vacation to the moon, where she looses her mobile phone.
6.- CHARACTERS SUGGESTED BY CHILDREN
Having set out one or several characters, the mind often has a hard time finding a story to fit. Try geting a character just asking to your child. Your child will identify with the character it has chosen, and you can use that to teach your child via that character.
Get ready to think of something involving a frog and a centipede! After the first surprise, you end up imagining a race in which the frogs ride on wild centipedes. Another variant could be that your child is a character in the story. This makes the child very attentive, but he or she will have to be capable of dealing with the particular virtues and defects brought out during the story.
FILMS
Films can give you the idea you were waiting on. Any movie or series you enjoyed as a child (ET, Heidi, Star Wars, Superman…) will provide you with ideas for telling a great story.
GIVE A TWIST TO WELL KNOW CHARACTERS
Characters well known to children, like Spongebob Squarepants, Thomas the Tank Engine, or the Disney characters, can be very useful when you need to produce a creative story. As they are so well known, modifying them on anything will make a serp impact. For example, Aladdin could live in the lamp with the Genie, and be so squashed in together that they would have to learn to share everything.
