6 Ways to Find Your Best Ideas Before You Start Writing

For writers, ideas are the primal matter. No ideas, no stories. But sometimes trying to figure out how to find your best ideas is like catching butterflies. They flit in; they flit out. If we aren’t paying attention, sometimes we don’t even recognize that they’ve been there. Even when we do stop short in awe of their beauty, we risk damaging them if we get too excited and try to capture them too quickly or too forcefully.

Not all ideas are this fragile, of course. There are different kinds of ideas. There are solid, logical, left-brain ideas. These are the ones we feel in control of. We come up with them. We guide them. We get to decide whether our protagonists take Road A or Road B because we are the ones who have also decided what’s going to be at the end of those roads.

But other ideas—the butterfly ideas—are more ephemeral, spontaneous, right-brain ideas. These are the “inspired” ideas, the ones gifted to us from beyond our own conscious understanding. These are the ideas that happen when our subconscious takes over. The story writes us rather than us writing the story.

[The] problem was that I froze the inspiration into an idea before I even began to actually write. Although both types of ideas are crucial to the process of wrangling a story into cohesion and resonance, I’d argue the right-brain ideas are really the true substance. Inspiration, after all, is every writer’s absinthe. But inspiration cannot be forced. Indeed, inspiration can’t even really be caught. When the left brain tries to take over a new idea and tame it, the idea may either die in captivity or fade to a pale version of itself. As Natalie Goldberg laments at one point in Wild Mind:

Subconscious ideation can only be observed, appreciated, and recorded carefully. We must each find our own balance for making sure our ideas don’t leave the preserve, while still letting them run wild on the page. But this can be easier said than done, since all creative spontaneity and no conscious control doesn’t lend itself very well to the true craftsmanship of writing.

6 Ways to Find Your Best Ideas—Before You Start Writing Them

In the 20+ years I’ve been writing, I have noted that my best process is never one that hurries ideas. It lets the ideas come to me—as gifts, surprises. And then it waits, patiently, to see if another idea will come and perhaps yet another.

A motto that has served me well is:

One idea does not a story make.

The rationale behind this is that if I try to sit down and write an entire story based on just one idea (or perhaps even a small handful of ideas), I inevitably end up filling in most of the story with left-brain ideas. The stories can be still be pretty good this way, but in my view neither the process nor the product is the same as the stories with a higher ratio of right-brain ideas.

I feel this holds true whether your preferred process is to discover your story in the outline or to discover it in the first draft. Regardless, it’s about getting our conscious brains, with their know-it-all tendencies, out of the way long enough for us to tap into the zone and see what might be waiting for us in a deeper reservoir of inspiration. Goldberg went on to say:

The initial subject matter might not have anything finally to do with what we really need to say. Just keep your hand moving and let whatever is about to happen unfold. Let writing do writing. Don’t manipulate it with your ideas about what you think should happen.

Obviously, there is a time and a place for doing exactly the opposite. For example, this is not the approach you want to take when troubleshooting your plot. But it’s also true that it’s difficult to truly discover a story when your conscious brain is determined it already knows what it’s going to find.

If you’re like me—with an inordinately loud and bossy conscious brain—then you might benefit from the following six ways to find your best ideas as you cultivate, channel, and honor your deeper inspiration.

1. Treat Ideas Like Butterflies—Just Watch at First(And if you feel your left brain is the half that most needs the gym, I recommend studying plot theory, particularly story structure, which will help you make better conscious decisions about your story.

I still believe the best part of the writing process is the daydreaming. That’s how it all started for me, as I imagine it did for many of you, just lazily watching the “movies” in my head—random images, characters, and scenarios that would present themselves to my mind’s eye. It’s the adult(-ish) version of playacting in the backyard. There’s no forcing, no pursuing—just watching and appreciating.

2. Capture With Care—Don’t Touch

When I was young, I would catch butterflies—Monarchs and Yellow Swallowtails. I’d pinch their wings between my fingers for a moment, just to get a better look. But then I noticed the colors of their wings flaking off in my hand and learned that my gentle inspection might just have crippled those delicate butterflies. I let the butterflies alone now.

And in their early iterations, I treat my ideas the same way. I don’t let my conscious brain anywhere near them. In the very beginning, I won’t even scribble down notes. I relate strongly to what Goldberg reported about “freezing” inspiration before it even has a chance to fully emerge from the cocoon and reveal to me its true (and often surprising) potential.

3. Keep Watching—Add More Ideas to Your Collection

The longer I’m able to wait and watch my growing collection of ideas for any particular story, the richer the trove I end up with. Some stories have matured, undisturbed, for years. Those are almost always my favorite ones to write. When I sit down to outline, the plot is usually all but complete. All I have to do is tweak a few things and add a few scenes. Other stories, with far fewer organic ideas to draw from, are still rewarding to write, but they’re almost always a lot more work—and, interestingly, not always as logical.

Of course, you don’t have to wait years for ideas to mature. Indeed, if your best writing process is to use writing itself to ideate, then just letting rip in the first draft, as Goldberg suggests, can afford you a deep, almost meditative brainstorming safari. Regardless your process, your right brain is usually a better judge of a story’s readiness to be written than is your left brain. I often gut-check myself with Margaret Atwood’s pithy notation:

…you know when you’re not ready; you may be wrong about being ready, but you’re rarely wrong about being not ready.

4. Seek Them Out—Purposefully Dreamzone

Even when you’re trying to get quiet and let your right brain speak to you, nobody says you have to wait for ideas to come to you. Jungle expeditions are always valuable. Discovery writing, as noted above, is one way of doing this. Just… write. Put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and see what you find.

One of my favorite exercises is one I’ve discussed before. I call it “dreamzoning.” Basically, it’s daydreaming on steroids. Make a date with yourself to sit down, zone out, and intensely focus on imagining your story. You’re not logically creating a plot or solving problems. Rather, you’re visiting that same place in your brain where you go to daydream—where pictures and ideas arise spontaneously. For me, semi-darkness and music is helpful for tapping into that place.

5. Let Your Subconscious Write More of the Story Than Your Conscious

Even if you’re a heavy-duty outliner who plans all the big-picture twists and turns of the plot before writing the first draft, you will still want to approach the actual writing of the story from a place of curiosity and surrender. One of the chief pitfalls of writing with an outline can be the loss of spontaneity and inspiration in the actual writing. Instead of methodically plodding from known plot point to known plot point, seek to access that same “dreamzone” when in the throes of hammering out the words of your story’s first draft. Even if you need to stop and check your map every now and then, focus on the lived experience of dreaming the story onto the page.

6. Brainstorm to Fill in the Gaps—Carefully

The trick is to do this carefully, to use your knowledge and understanding of story technique to help you fill in blanks and guide the story on its most resonant path—without disturbing your connection to your deeper creativity. We’re unlikely to find all the ideas or guidance we need in the dreamzone. We have to surface for air and orientation every now and then. But we should be seeking a balance between the raw flow and the careful course-correction. To the degree we over-correct, we often end up feeling, as Gail Carson Levine put it, that: None of this is to discount the importance of consciousness and logic in crafting your story. Story is both art and craft. At a certain point (probably many points) in the process, you will need to step back from the heady rush of writing from the zone and examine your story logically. Everything from spelling and sentence structure on up to plot structure and character arc will benefit from a conscious organization.

Ideas are ideas, and words on paper are words on paper; they’re not the same thing, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves.

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The amount of time you need to spend in the wilds will be different for any given story. But returning again and again to this primal inspiration will keep your compass straight and help ensure you’re writing the stories you really want to tell. In relation to all this, I also found the following quote from Goldberg to be resonant and inspiring:

[I realized] I wouldn’t be so afraid to die because I would have been busy dying in each book I wrote, learning to get out of the way and letting my characters live their own lives.

To me, this speaks of tapping that deep, raw creativity and letting the stories write us as much as we write the stories.