One of my fears going into the effort, and one of the reasons I made myself do the 30 short stories in 30 days, was that I'd run out of story ideas on about, oh, the third day. Happily, that didn't happen. I did feel I was running lower on story ideas toward the end of the month. Perhaps I was pickier, but I think I was running lower.
On the other hand, there were a couple of dud days early in the month as well -- I'm thinking in particular of the day I had my shortest story, but then again I just looked it up and it was a few days later. I suppose if I can forget work-related things over just one weekend, I can easily forget the difficulties I had getting an idea to write about early in the month by now.
Many of the ideas I had were too big for short stories. (Thanks, Mary, for your rules-of-thumb on story size, and more importantly the emphasis on keeping the story focus tight.) Having ideas that were too big was tough, especially on the days I was struggling to find any ideas for a short story, but kept having nice novella- or novel-length ideas.
I did write the bigger ideas down, and many setting- and character-related ideas that hadn't quite hit the write accumulation to become a story. A number of my jotted-down ideas are actually just cool background or setting ideas, without the conflict I was looking for to be able to generate a short story. I'll be revisiting all of these, possibly in the near future.
By the time I got to the middle of the month, I could see certain themes for these stories. In no particular order: uplifted species, fantasy creatures in the modern world, and superhero/supervillain. I don't think I'd previously written a story with any of these elements, which was interesting. I wonder if they'll stick around, or if I'll look back and recognize a phase I was going through.
Judging by how interesting I find the story ideas right now, I'll be keeping those themes.
Sources of inspiration:
- Early on, a web search for "story prompts" helped, though not as much after I had run through all that I found interesting in the early results list. Those were pretty hit-and-miss, but a few good ideas came from them.
- Mythology, in various forms: skimming through my encyclopedia of mythology book looking for interesting characters, facts, themes, or even wholesale plots was the most common. Second most common was reading descriptions of mythological beasts I had previously not known about, and what they were known for, and putting something in that situation.
- Just thinking about cool things in stories and how I could make a story with that cool thing in it.
- Other stories, when I felt I understood the underlying idea enough translate it into an entirely different setting.
As for MICE, I found I didn't use it as much as I thought I would to generate ideas; in fact, I hardly used it at all that way during the month -- possibly for 3, maybe 4 stories. I think part of that is due to the time constraints not allowing me to generate a bunch of story ideas and fleshing them out before picking one. I hope part is due to better internalizing the ideas behind the technique.
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