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I am going to introduce you eigth simple ways to produce ideas for your writings. These useful tips are the best summary of the work done across many live seminars, where attendees produce their own excellent stories
To produce a story, as these creative stories for children, you just need a message to communicate, along with the setting and characters. So I want to go here into how to come up with the characters and the setting, and show you how easily you can make them fun and inventive.
Here you will find some ways to helpensure that you will never ever say again you don’t know how to come up with a new great story:
UNEXPECTED ASSOCIATIONS
Select two unconnected words, and make your imagination work trying to create an association between them. 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. Of course, the more crazy the conversions are, the more fun and inventive the story.
Produce new names for something completely new
Prefixes and sufixes result in unexpected objects. What is an “antipotato”? And a “multipet”, or a “minicoin”? Trying to find meaning in an object modified by a prefix which comes with its own associations, the mind bestows entertaining and original characteristics to the resulting object. Prefixes you can use include: a, anti, dis, bi, tri, co, hyper, multi, semi, super, micro, mini, maxi, etc.
4.- IMPOSSIBLE CONTRAPTIONS
Strange Machines are loved by any kind of children. 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.
ALTER WELL KNOWN STORIES
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? Another option is to modify time and place? For sure, we could modify 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 are an unending source of surprising plots. Any movie or series you enjoyed as a child (ET, Heidi, Star Wars, Superman…) will provide you with ideas for telling a great story.
MODIFY A WELL KNOWN CHARACTER
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.
