Hey guys. Megan Tennant here. Welcome back to the channel. I've got another video
for you guys today. I recently hit a hiccup in the Red River outline and I
need to completely revamp my outline to fix it. I had to spend some time
re-brainstorming and coming up with new ideas. Which made me think about my
process for coming up with new ideas. So I wanted to share with you guys what I
do. Some of these might be familiar to you, but I did this based on what I do.
I didn't go and look up any lists or watch other people's videos so hopefully some
of these are new. Number seven is my favorite and I'm pretty sure you
wouldn't have heard that one before. So stick around for number seven.
Number one is consume media outside of your genre. You hear people all the time saying that
to get ideas and get inspired, you know, you should read books in your genre.
Right? Which is great but at the same time, then the ideas you're getting are
ones that people created after they also watched things in the genre and read
things in the genre. I'm not saying they're copied but the ideas have been
present and recycled throughout the genre for a long time so they're gonna
feel kind of tired. And obviously no matter what media you're consuming
you're not gonna be copying directly from that media, that's wrong, don't do
that! But if you get your inspiration and your creative sparks from a media that's
completely outside your genre, your book is just gonna feel all around more creative.
Two: binge watch trailers. If you want to get a ton of different
concepts and ideas into your mind all at once, just a fleeting, constant bombardment
of information to try to spark creations of your own. I've found that binge watching
trailers is perfect because, one, you have that music that's already set up to get
you pumped. Two, they're just constant flashing scenes and information and
details. Each trailer is meant to convey the whole plot and sometimes subplots
of these movies, so there's lots of information crammed into these little
bundles of video. So you get little bits of pieces and you put it together in
your mind into something new. It works for me!
Number three is something that I miss and that is forced brainstorming
sessions. Most of the ideas for Aletheia came from me thinking over the plot and
characters while stuck in traffic, back when I worked my day job in programming
and I was driving in traffic stuck for about two hours a day five days a week.
Being in a place where you're kind of stuck and you have no other choice
but to just kind of explore in your mind. If you force yourself to think about
your characters and your plot, you're gonna have a lot more sparking
creativity than if you're sitting at home in front of the computer and trying
to focus knowing you can just click on Twitter at any time. So you can do this
by driving, you can go a long walk, you can go to workout without any sort of
visual media, or taking long showers, long baths. Basically go somewhere
where you don't have access to your phone, you don't have access to any sort
of entertainment. Number four is music and I don't just mean the way I normally rep
music. I love music for writing. I think it's a huge inspiration. But I mean music
itself as storytelling. So basically put on music and sit there and listen to the
lyrics. Pay attention to the story. Imagine those lyrics applied to one of
the characters in your story and applied to your world and the plot and where
your story is going. Imagine that that song is a theme song to some part in
your book and then see where the lyrics go and where that would take your plot.
There are multiple scenes in Aletheia where there was either a Rise Against
song or a Three Days Grace song where I listened to it and I thought "this kind
of matches this character". If this book was a movie where would this song be
playing in the book? Number six is a little weird. I don't use this one as
much, but it can sometimes be helpful. If you search online anywhere you will find
all over the place random plot generators, and you should never grab
your whole plot from one of these things, but if you randomly generate a bunch of
different plots and characters and stuff and just skim through it, little pieces
of information will stick with you and it will help get new
pieces of information into your mind, different components that you can work
with to create your own characters and thoughts and ideas. So it's just kind of a
way to get lots of little pieces of random information floating around in
your brain such that you can grab those pieces and put them together into a new
configuration. Six, go to Goodreads, search for random books, and read the reviews.
Whether they be good or bad (preferably ones you've read before so you don't get
spoilers). But reviewers tend to mention specific scenes that made them feel
specific ways or specific scenes that they're complaining about. So going
through a bunch of different books and reading a review here and a review there
you'll get these little snippets of scenes and characters and then you walk
away from these reviews, sit down think about your own story. And just like with
the plot generator you'll now have all of these little bits and pieces of
information flitting around in your head. You can grab tiny bits of each and just
smash them together into something new. You can also, I suppose, achieve this by
just picking up random books on your shelf, and reading a page here and there.
But reviews summarize it into little bite-sized pieces so I've always done it
by just going through reviews. And last but not least, number 7. My favorite way
to get unique ideas. Some of you guys know that the main idea from Aletheia
came from a dream. I used to have really detailed dreams all the time that were
just full of ideas, but as the years have gone on I've started sleeping better and
better and I've been having less dreams like that. So I I found a new method
which works for me now and I don't know how well it'll work for you guys so if
you try this let me know in the comments if this worked for you. But basically I
call it dream edging. So say you're stuck on a plot point or you're outlining you
don't know where you want to go. Take a nap but take your alarm and set it on
your phone to go off every like 15 to 20 minutes depending on how fast you fall
asleep. Basically, set it to go off such that you'll start to get into that dream
phase, you'll start to dream a little bit, and then your phone wakes you up. Have a
notebook right next to you. Have in your mind kind of the problem
you're looking to solve or the part of the plot you're looking to bridge. And
think about that as you're falling asleep. And you'll fall into these, just,
little snippets of dreams here and there and whenever you wake up to the alarm
write down anything interesting (not paying attention the handwriting or
trying to make sense). Just write down stream of consciousness and then hit the
snooze for another fifteen to twenty to twenty five minutes and go right back to
dreaming. For me this works really well because waking up that frequently, it's
not long enough for me to have forgotten the dream and not long enough for me to
fall into a deeper sleep where I'm no longer dreaming. So it's just like little
bits and chunks and pieces of dreams here and there and of course dreams get
crazy and weird but those crazy weird insane things can be turned into valid
ideas and plot points. So yes, dream edging. I'm making that a thing. So yeah, that was it for this video.
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