How to Generate Short Story Ideas

Video Transcript

"How do we find the idea for a short story, not one that's already written, but one that we want to write ourselves. Well, one thing we can do is read a good book about writing short stories, such as this one, Creating Short Fiction, by Damon Knight, which happens to be my favorite of the books the books that will help you to write. But, we're not just looking for a story that happens to be short, it has to have the beginning, the middle, and the end. The easiest way to sum it up is really that you have a person, and whether that person is an alien or a bunny rabbit, or a human being, doesn't matter, it's still a person who has a problem and strives to solve that problem, and doesn't necessarily succeed. You can have a short story in which the protagonist fails, but learns something non the less, and that learning is enough of a triumph, enough of a victory for the reader to be satisfied, the protagonist doesn't have to be satisfied, the reader has to be satisfied. So we either succeed or fail, presumably fail nobley, fail meaningfully, and the protagonist should be changed in some way, change is what we are always looking for in a piece of writing, in a good piece of writing, something is going to change. Ideally what you have is at least two ideas going on at the same time. Damon Knight talks about the intersection of two ideas, putting together perhaps two unrelated ideas and see how they will both affect your story. Any number of classic short stories, you have for example in, Hills Like White Elephants, you have two people who are waiting for a train, and they're drinking quite a lot, and they're evading the issue that they are really needing to discuss, and we don't even know what their final decision is. The man picks up their bags and puts them by one of the train tracks to go some place, but we don't know in which direction they windup going. So we have their intersection at the landscape, their intersection with their problem, their intersection with their apparent drinking problem, all of these things going on together, and it is where they mesh, that would create the interesting short story."