Trolling for Ideas

When you are fully engaged in the art of writing, you never really have any time off. When you are not actively creating, you are researching, observing, or jotting down stray ideas that might help your story. If you have a full-time job, the hours spent there can seem like interruptions—time spent relaxing, by comparison—to the hard work you really want to be doing. All thoughts are possible figments that can be collected when you sit down to write.

One of the most fertile sources of ideas is, not surprisingly, other books. That’s because the acuity of a good writer often reminds you of thoughts you yourself have had before. I should pause to clarify terms. I am a staunch enemy of plagiarism, as is anyone engaged in the book industry and knows how hard writers struggle. The mining of ideas I am suggesting operates at a plane once removed. 

Rather than the written words, or the original juxtaposition of phrases, you need to jot down the concept that struck you. For example, let’s say you’re reading about a young man who, being awkward at parties himself, becomes jealous of his girlfriend for spending too much time enjoying the company of another man at a party. You realize that for your book, such an incident would be perfect for demonstrating the character’s overall decline into paranoia. What’s more, you are struck by how well the author captures not only the initial poisonous simmering at the party, but how the character thinks about it afterward, maybe the next morning, the next evening, and a week later, when they attend another party. Does he in fact say anything to his girlfriend, or is he too ashamed of what he was projecting on her? That alone would indicate the depth of paranoia. At a conceptual level, you see the technique employed, and that becomes a springboard for your original train of narration. 

At a lower level, reading other books can remind you of details that you want to add to scenes. Again, don’t steal what is original, but use the book as you would any other source you research. If the author is writing about dogs, you can seize upon appurtenances that help fill out your possibly vague memory of when you owned a dog. Items such as dirt smearing the dog’s red collar or dried hanks of fur where the dog has wallowed in mud could, if you choose your own wording, describe dogs in dozens of other novels, stories, articles, etc. Just as valuable, you may read a detail that sparks off in your mind a memory of an entirely different detail about your dog, perhaps the way white hair slowly ringed its muzzle as it aged and the way you felt about that.

Remember the reason you’re looking for ideas: to feed more ideas into your book. When you jot down ideas, you’re not leapfrogging off someone else. You know what is in your book, and the idea can relate directly to a scene that you’ve already written. By the same token, I have deliberately rented movies merely to pick off details that relate to a setting, often in the past, that reside in the back of my mind and will not come to the forefront on its own. You are a hunter, so go gather for your book.

Exercise: Keep a pocket notebook or iPad at your side when you read your next novel. When you see a striking idea, stop (if you can resist the author’s narrative pull) and write, in your own words, what that idea sets off in your mind. If you have a scene set in the desert, for instance, it’s useful to have a description of how it feels when a granule of sand gets in your eye. You may not use all of the entries on your list when you are finished, but even if you use a couple, your book is that much richer.

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.” —John Irving

Copyright @2025, John Paine