 Hello and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here my name's Jackie and I'm an aspiring fiction author who does videos about things like plotting and outlining and drafting and having mental breakdowns in the middle of drafting so if that sounds like something that would be interesting to you please subscribe and like and hit the notification bell. Basically do everything that will keep the gods of YouTube happy. So I recently completed a first draft which is now in a drawer to be forgotten about for the next two to three months which means it is time to look for my next book idea. So I thought I'd do a video today about my process for finding new book ideas. Step one is simply write everything down. Now before I drafted my last book I thought I was a sort of person who didn't have a lot of ideas because I had only had one idea for a book for over 10 years in my head and I never really explored any others and it wasn't until I decided last year that I was going to do NaNoWriMo and I had to find some ideas that I went through. All of the old notes on my phone and all of the old scribbles in the back of my journal that I discovered I actually had a whole list of things I could potentially write about. So the way I do it is I often have these really weird vivid dreams and I have a notebook next to my bed where if I have a weird vivid dream I will get up and write about it as soon as it's done. Now these notes are generally not the most legible notes which can be interesting when I'm later trying to decipher them but what it means is that anytime I have an inkling of an idea it is written down so that when I am ready to then work on a new project I have a list that's ready to go rather than trying to think of a brand new idea on the spot. Now if you're hearing this and thinking well I do never have ideas though like it's all very well and good for you to say write them down but what if I've got nothing to write down? I would try to be a little bit more open with what you classify as an idea because as you'll see later in this video some of my ideas are quite in depth. I might have an entire world or inciting incident or family that the book's going to be about and that gives me a really solid starting point for writing a book. However an idea could be as simple as I work with a lot of Russians and wouldn't be fun if I put them all into the same fictional universe and saw what happened or I feel really strongly about this issue in the world or in the media at the moment and I'd love to write a book that explores that or I'm so mad at my sister right now and I really need to just argue with someone and maybe I can argue on paper so it can be anything from a complete world or plot or event or character through to something that you want to explore. The main point for step one is just to write everything down. Step two is to make sure that everything is written down in the same place. So one of the things you might notice as you start observing things and making notes of things you'd like to explore in your writing is that these notes are going to be in a range of different places so I have them in the back of my journal which I keep on my bedside table and I generally write in there if I have a dream. I have notes in my phone from when I've been traveling. I have notes on little bits of hotel stationary from when I've been traveling. I've got them in old documents and who knows where else and one of the reasons why I felt like I had no ideas for so long was because I didn't know where they were like I actually had tens, dozens, scores maybe of ideas written down but I couldn't find them. So one of the things I did at the beginning of October when I was preparing for NaNoWriMo was I created a spreadsheet. Now this spreadsheet has one tab for every idea so it helps keep things straight. It means there is a single place you can refer to so that when you are ready to start working on a new project rather than trying to remember those ideas off the top of your head you have this single source where you can find them. The other benefit of putting them all into one place is that through the act of transcribing your ideas you'll be able to evaluate whether they have any promise or not. So as someone who gets a lot of her ideas from random dreams I can wake up thinking oh my god that was epic it was it's going to be a smash hit motion picture I absolutely have to write it and then I'll do the notes and go back to sleep. When I transfer it to this spreadsheet that's what tells me if maybe there is potential to turn it into something or whether I'm just insane. So if you look at the ideas video I did back in early October last year you'll see that one of them involved basically three arms getting severed which um I know maybe in some sort of horror it can work but that's not really my genre and honestly I think even in horror it's probably taking it a step too far so that one I typed out and then went let's just delete that tab straight away. The other thing that the spreadsheet's helpful for is seeing how much of an idea you have in that initial spurt of inspiration so for the project I recently finished this is what I had umbrella academy style family of children with powers with one girl who can't use hers dad is going to send her out into the world to try using them and everyone leaves the house she stalls knowing that someone will come to drive her out before long she is in the bathroom and here's someone into the house uh is a bit confused thanks already that was fast she ducks behind the bath into the windowbox to hide and thinks maybe if I stay my powers will come out by instinct her sister enters the room she gasps sister says run she fumbles with the window behind her and falls through as the sister fills the room with fire and as she is falling out she hears the words don't bother coming back until you have powers so that scene there was the inciting incident or the turning point that set the plot into motion and having a complete scene actually meant that when I started to write even though I wasn't as prepared as I'd like to be at least I had one scene I could start with whereas there are other ideas where I don't have a specific scene so another tab says 12 year old girl is friends with some sort of fairy slash god you start creating mischief around the town and everyone thinks it's her so there is a premise there but there's not as much to work with that doesn't mean it's a bad idea it just means it's incomplete and there's some more exploration to do and that brings us to the next step step three for finding your book idea is to then go through your spreadsheet or your file where you've collected all of those ideas and take a look at them and think which one of these sparks interest for me right now and I'd recommend not just picking one straight away but picking between three and five that you'd like to explore so I'm going to take a quick look at my own spreadsheet and see which ones sound interesting to me right now one of the things you might notice as you're going through everything is that similar themes come up in different ideas so I have a number that feature people with superhuman abilities however I do want to avoid that for my next project because that was a big part of my last project I also have a few with parents who are dead or have amnesia and I have a few I've got a couple about like 11 12 year old main characters so what that means to me is clearly these are areas that I want to explore in more depth and maybe if I've got like a cup a fragment here and a fragment here that have some crossover is it possible for me to put them together and create a more substantial idea five minutes later okay so I've been through my spreadsheet and there are four ideas that I'd like to explore in a little bit more detail now so one is so we've all had those running dreams I'm sure where you run and run and you're going so fast and then you start to fly and I remember I had this idea years ago actually and it was about basically a girl who could run and fly in dreams but the twist is that in her dreams she was like the secret agent and working on behalf of some agency and the people who were chasing after her were like the enemy agency or whoever and so in her dream life she's like a spy and in her real life she's just a regular you know 11 12 year old student she happens to be quite good at running and track and she starts to see things from her dream in real life and they eventually start to merge and she isn't sure what's real and what's not anymore so I thought that could be fun the next one is actually one that came up when I was last writing down my ideas so not too distant future the main character is an engineered superhuman and part of a program that was quickly destroyed so these people are very rare she is capable of functioning like a normal human but she needs a lot of meat to maintain who she is so herself her skills her sanity her humanity if she goes too long without eating meat she starts wanting to eat the people around her and the concept behind that is like what if the key to remaining human is to eat others and can you still be human if the cost of your humanity is cannibalism basically again these are all very rough it's very early stages but we are only partway through the process the next one is the god of mischief one I mentioned earlier so girl becomes a friend friends with a fairy or god who starts creating mischief and everyone thinks it's her and the final one is about a special mineral so a woman works at a museum where they're showcasing a newly discovered mineral slash substance believed to help with regeneration eternal life it does something special someone steals it she eventually catches up to them but suddenly all these other people are after her because everyone wants this super mineral and she needs to eat it to keep it safe and it starts affecting her very quickly so all of these obviously very rough I haven't done any work on them beyond the initial jotting them down but that's okay because this is still early in the process this brings us to step four which is to do some brainstorming now you can brainstorm however you want to if you like to use a mind map and just see which ideas spark if you have certain questions you want to do to explore something I'm just going to do some string of consciousness writing to see what ideas I have when I'm thinking about these different concepts and whichever ones have the most they're the ones I'm going to continue exploring so it's been not that long maybe between five and ten minutes and I have about three quarters of a page for the dream spy story and what I've written down is basically what I already know about the idea or what what could be true so sort of if I'm asking myself what could this book be what could it be about I've just been jotting down ideas around that I've also been raising questions in my notes so there are some things that I already described so 11 year old girl is a regular student blah blah blah when she sleeps she is really a courier for a secret agency and takes documents between bases then questions why is an agency using kids well could it be that they're less suspicious are they faster than adults in the stream world or could they actually have been bred for this are they little clones or creatures that have been created for the agency's purposes next question what does the agency actually want what do they do I have no idea and then another one why are they sending physical documents why aren't they emailing or doing some sort of online encryption so these are the things that I don't expect to have answers to off the top of my head the first time that I start looking at this idea but having questions for me is a good sign because it shows me that there are things to explore so from here is part of step four I would do that for each of my ideas until I ran out of steam so it might be five to ten minutes I might have one idea where I just get going and it's 30 minutes and I'm still writing which is a really good sign but at this stage I just want to see if thinking about this sparks more thoughts if you're stuck and you're sitting down and you have a blank page or a blank word document and you aren't sure where to start with your brainstorming an exercise that I found really helpful is Susan Dennard's looking for magical cookies in your book now I already have a video on this so I will put a link in a card so you can see it as well as in the description below but a summary is the exercise is supposed to help you rediscover your passion and interest in a story and the example she gives is when you're in the middle of it and you've gotten to a stage we're just slugging through but it's not working and it's really it's boring you as the author which means it's going to bore everyone else but I think it can also be helpful at this stage when you're right at the beginning and trying to decide what you want to work on next so the areas you need to look at are what made you want to write about this idea so in my case I have these four ideas that I shortlisted why did I shortlist them what was interesting to me about them what do I want to explore with this what makes me excited then once you've done your list of reasons why you want to work on this the next piece is I imagine dot dot dot and here you imagine all of the things that link to everything you've just said so I haven't actually done this I'm looking through my papers because I haven't actually done this today as part of these projects but I want to see if I can find when I did it for powerless um yes there we go okay so powerless is the project I just finished and I have what made me want to write powerless I identify with the odd one out dynamic of the main character versus her sisters I love how the father will stop at nothing he sent her siblings after her when he was kicking her out I like the full circle of the narrative that there's a clear inner journey as well as an outer one because the inner journey was supposed to be that self-acceptance I don't think that quite happened in the first draft because I was trying to get it done but this is at the brainstorming stage and I knew that that was an element I wanted to be in there and I hadn't really thought about any of my ideas from an inner journey perspective as well as the outer journey before so those were the three things that I came up with when I asked myself why I wanted to write that book when I asked myself what I imagined I have epic fight scenes where she has to survive without powers hmm this is interesting revisiting this now that I've done the draft I'm like did I include that probably not to the extent that I could have anyway epic fight scenes where she has to survive without powers secret conversations between her and her sister underworld slash mafia involvement which did end up happening time limit is there a ticking clock where she needs where she needs to succeed by a certain time or else they'll kill her or get rid of her and then what would make me want to write each scene in this book so here I've just got tension intrigue possibility slash hope and if you look at Susan Dennard's example she's got things like she loves the romantic tension between her characters and one of the things she really wants to write is almost kisses lots of almost kisses so if I'm thinking about these ideas what would make me want to write this dream spy story and I'm like I want to describe that moment when she lifts off of the ground I want to have this really clear expectation that if she's ever in danger she can wake up and then I want everything to fall apart because one time she can't wake up and she can't go back to the real world or I want her to get back to the real world but it's not safe anymore because they've somehow followed her there now although this video has covered four steps this is not the complete process for me as what I will be doing next is actually trying a couple of different plotting methods in my short list of ideas so I'm expecting I'll have two or three left once I go through the brainstorming and then I'm going to try the snowflake method story grid and either the story circle or story clock depending on what how long it takes my story clock workbook to arrive because I live in Estonia and postage is slow here what I did last year before nano rimo was I had three short listed ideas and for each of them I used the take off your pants method save for cat method and story engineering so I will include a link so you can check that out if it's interesting to you in your case maybe you'll do this initial brainstorming and that'll be enough and you'll have brainstormed around your three or four ideas and you'll see that one of them clearly has much more and that one's the one you're more excited about and you're ready to start writing straight away maybe you're a pancer and you don't like the idea of plotting and outlining in my case I found one of the really valuable things about going through the plotting exercise was that it was just a more structured approach to brainstorming so rather than just doing an off the top of my head what do I think would be cool stream of consciousness ramble like I've just done I had to address certain things I had to think about theme and I had to think about the characters and I had to think about key events that would happen in the book and that forced me to develop the ideas a lot more before I started writing and honestly the plan I had for powerless wasn't perfect the book did change and develop a lot as I started writing reading those notes just now I realised I left a whole lot out but the exercise was still helpful in getting the creative juices flowing so as an optional step five I recommend picking one or two outlining methods and try to outline your book before you start writing just to give your brain more to chew over in terms of brainstorming and creativity the other unrelated thing I wanted to mention today is if you haven't been able to tell from my accent I am Australian and Australia is currently experiencing its worst bushfires in history from the news I believe New South Wales has lost a third of its koalas over 20 people have lost their lives and between 20 and 30 people are missing in Victoria at the moment the air quality is so bad that people are having to wear masks in order to breathe and it's even reached New Zealand which is 2,000 kilometers away the fires have been going on for about two months already and usually peak bushfire season isn't until February or March so there could potentially be another two months of this ahead when it comes to the size of the fires it's spread to over five million hectares which is if I check my stats over five times the size of the Amazon fires in 2019 and over two and a half times the size of the 2018 California fires now I know I have 50 subscribers so this video probably isn't going to do much but if this happens to be the one that goes viral I'd like to ask anyone who sees this to please do what you can I've put links in the description to different organizations you can donate to which include the local firefighters, Salvation Army, Red Cross and a whole lot of organizations that are both trying to stop the fires and provide relief to the victims it doesn't need to be much like even if you can just spare a couple of dollars if hundreds of thousands of people around the world did that it would make a huge difference that is all from me to today back on the subject of writing if you have a method for finding and choosing book ideas I would love to hear it so please leave a comment below and I will see you next time bye