My semester of creative writing is about to be over.

And apart from that I've been writing fiction for more than 15 years and listened to a lot advice from writers throughout the years. I've gathered some of the best advice so you can fill up an entire notebook with fiction ideas.

So, here I'm gonna give you 10 tips for getting fiction ideas.

1. Take walks

Taking walks is a great way to get your ideas flowing.

Some say it's necessary to walk 20.000 steps a day, and this, I am sure, is both healthy and helpful with idea-generation. But, let me just tell you that less will do it as well. Taking a walk that's 20-30 minutes long will also get your ideas flowing.

Especially if you make it a consistent habit.

2. Read books

Reading books is the easiest way to get inspiration.

Books are filled with so much information. If you're reading fiction, you can take themes or storylines and reuse them and tell them in your own way. If you're reading non-fiction, you can look out for struggles or points that you resonate with and write stories surrounding those, and how a character can overcome that particular struggle, which will be a lot easier if you have overcome that struggle too.

Books are a bunch of ideas written in long form that you can split apart and retell in your own way.

3. Talk to people

By talking to people you see their reactions first hand when you tell them your stories.

So practice your storytelling in front of the people you talk to. Maybe people will be annoyed if you're always sharing fiction ideas. So try to tell them stories from your own life, and do so in an interesting way, and see how you can shape events from your life and make it interesting to listen to.

Conversations with people are a free untapped focus group, and the more you practice and the better you become, the more likely it is that people want to hear your stories.

4. Listen to people

When you talk to people don't just tell stories, listen to people's stories too.

If someone tells you an interesting story or a surprising turn of events, write it down. Save it for a later time. And then when you're writing one of your next stories and you’re looking for an event or a twist then use what you have saved.

It's like the age old saying, "truth is stranger than fiction."

5. Reuse old ideas

For each story you write, you become a little better.

Which is why it's important to finish stories and write them all the way to the end. So, go back, and look at the ideas from your former stories, specifically ones where you think they deserve another crack. And then use what you learned and make it better this time.

Your ideas are your ideas, you can reuse them as much as you'd like.

6. Spend time in silence

When creating ideas, it's important to give your mind time think.

I used to be terrified of silence, and I ended up living in the constant noise of podcasts, tv-shows, and YouTube videos. And sure I would get ideas, but they would never be thought through or original in any way. I trained myself to be able to sit in silence when I write, and I'm so much happier for it.

Silence is your ally, use it to your advantage.

7. Ask yourself questions

Some of my ideas have come from journaling, and my technique of journaling comes from asking myself questions.

It's much easier to start writing from a question, and the answer can also be small bullet points. A question could be "what moments of sadness have I encountered recently in which I pulled through and became happy again?" Write down a few moments in bullet points and then try to write a short story based on one of the events.

Questions are a way of opening your mind to start analyzing your thoughts.

8. Remix your favorite stories

Remixing is not only for DJs, some of the world's greatest authors do it too.

Two examples are:

· Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino

· Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

Reservoir Dogs is heist story where you never see the heist and Mistborn is a fantasy novel structured like a heist movie.

So, you can take established genres and do something unexpected with them like Tarantino or mix genres like Sanderson.

9. Adapt someone else's work

Adaptation is also a great exercise, because you already have the structure of your story established from the beginning.

I was once tasked at a film school to do an adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale called The Shadow. In the story a shadow of a learned man becomes autonomous and tries to take over the body of the learned man. I rewrote that into a story about a guy who was too afraid to ask out a girl, so his reflection manifested itself and took action on his own.

By using the fairytale as the source material I already had a a concept and a structure to base my story upon.

10. Pick apart movies for scene inspiration

Many film directors analyze movies to learn how they're constructed and use the same scenes in their movies.

We learned this concept too in my creative writing class in which a guest lecturer told us that you could deconstruct a genre by looking at it's parts––the scenes. She used the example of a romantic comedy and asked us to name scenes. Examples were: a meet-cute scene, a makeover scene, a scene where one of them learns a secret about the other and they break up only to find each other in the end.

You can do this with your favorite movies by looking for types of scenes that presents themselves over and over again within that genre.

Weekly Resource

One of the most interesting, funny answers to the question, “how do you get your ideas?”

Weekly Highlight

Free Resources

• My Ultimate Guide for Building an Email Newsletter

• The Content Creation List (Template)

• The Newsletter Template

• Medium Article (Template)

Until next time…

Hope these helps and you’re able to come up with lots of great ideas.

Even if you’re not a fiction writer these tips are helpful for every kind of writing.