Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

thesunscreen — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:32:54 +0530

The bulk of mine came from a dream. I woke up and thought man that was good I want to know more about that. I wrote down some of the key aspects on sticky note on my desktop. I was in the middle of writing my second full novel so I couldn't do anything with it. I heard about nano on another site and decided to give it a shot. I didn't think it would be fair to start with a novel I was already 80K words into so I put it aside and wrote "The curse of the Thorns." A story about children who basically have to learn to survive on their own around 500 years after the bulk of human kind is wiped out, and the world is a mostly barren wasteland. It was a good story until I hit 48K and then it just ended. I had to struggle for the last 2K words to put it over the top and I haven't gone back and read how it turned out. So where did your idea come frome? Real life, a bizzare toilet accident, something someone said to you?

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Iago Grey — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:38:52 +0530

That's... an excellent question. I can't remember there ever being an 'Aha!' moment for an idea, but the novel is more a soup of little fragments of ideas I've had in the past. There was an idea for a story in Wales and one for three men, and one for shadow people, and one for magic. Somehow this became three men going to Wales and finding a series of odd supernatural events occuring, with a constant malevolent presence in the darkness. So there was no moment when the idea came to me, it just happened by me improvising and all these little fragments coming together. :D (And can I just say, your story sounds EPIC).

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

JacenTheBard — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:04:44 +0530

A friend started up a new D&D campaign, and I created my main character for it. My NaNovel sort of follows the initial leg of the campaign, but obviously since this is my version of it, I left out the stuff I didn't like (or couldn't remember) and added in new stuff.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

warrchylde — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:07:50 +0530

The concept of right and wrong; actually. Like how one man can be all good and faithful and still hear about him 'going to hell' when he dies part. (Or even if there is a place to go to when that time comes.) It's like how evil can show you the right path because let's face it; we cannot define the righteous without the wrong. Well; enough said, I've been trying to stop myself from busting into flames since I started writing and attending mass.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Ghotay — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:12:16 +0530

Mine is actually an overgrown backstory. I originally had an idea for a fairly generic romance with all the usual fluff, wangst and so on. But then I thought "What would have happened to make the character that way?" (he's a pretty grouchy git), and started coming up with all these evnts throughout his life. Originally I was just going to write it in as info in the main fic, but I got so into it that I realised I just HAD to write out the whole thing. I think it's actually turning out a whole lot more interesting than the original story I came up with - though I'm still intending to write that. As a kind of 'relaxation' exercise - traditional romance is really easy to write. Tragic childhoods with realistic character development less so!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

oceansong99 — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:43:55 +0530

I built it a piece at a time, starting with my main character. She was what began as important, who she was, what made her what she was, the culmination of her experiences. My story is all about what she is becoming... the rest is just building blocks.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

the_silent_reader — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:54:09 +0530

The shower. No really. I came up with my idea while I was taking a shower. It has nothing to do about being in a shower, but that is where I got my idea. That is the second best place for me to get my ideas. The first being dreams. I don't really know what I was thinking about before I came up with this idea, but it blossomed there.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Elisabell_angel — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 23:50:46 +0530

I had written a play about the Columbine massacre in my senior year, and I had a lot of left over ideas from that.. that I couldn't write because it wouldn't be factual. I let those ideas stew for a while, and then I started to think about the characters.. Who kind of just showed up on my doorstep fully developed..

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

oceansong99 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:01:35 +0530

Shower isn't so wierd, I get ideas in the bathtub and while driving.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

crazygirl9310 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:15:39 +0530

...Dalton, the fan fic. The idea started out in April as a reinvention of Dalton with a ton of original characters but a very similar plot line (it was also mirroring my best friend's first relationship with a guy). Somewhere during planning in October mythical creatures got thrown in and the thing left Dalton in the dust.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Pickwick12 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:20:57 +0530

A scene popped into my head with my FMC in it, so I wrote it down, and then I didn't want to stop and do something else and lose NaNo steam. so I kept going and wrote a novel.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

kay.mindless — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:24:12 +0530

Dreams. That's where most of my ideas come from, though. I really like to sleep as a result.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

.izzy21. — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:49:02 +0530

Um. Luck? I had this original idea planned out about a month before NaNo actualls tarted (can't remember where it came from), but once the 1st rolled around, I just couldn't write about it. So, my actual NaNo novel ended up blooming from the first random sentence that popped into my head during a word war. Now I have prologues and more books planned.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Unforgivable — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:08:03 +0530

I'm not quite sure aware of it.. I found NaNoWrimo the 7th of November this year and I decided to give it a try even though the first week was gone already and I didn't have anything planned out. Then I thought to myself: What do I like to read about myself? - Dragons How do I make it original: - Dragons aren't a rare species nor is it supposed to be about dragonriders with only one dragon.. So I chose, well, in my novel, dragons are breeded and trained by breeders and then sold to the king and his army. What should my main character be like? - Female, because we see far too many male heroes around here. And really, she is a hero. It took me three days to come up with a decent plot for my novel. I found that by talking to a friend about what interesting things could happen. I wasn't even given ideas, I found them myself by talking straight from my heart without thinking and then deciding 'Hey, this is good!'. I spent a lot of time thinking it all through while working, being in school, showering. Basically all my sparetime was used for thinking about what could be interesting in my novel. Day 10 I started writing and I fell in love with my stubborn and reckless main character Emi, who was so outgoing and simply amazing. As the days went along I threw away and found new ideas and in the end, I couldn't help but feel like this is the perfect novel for fantasylovers like myself. ^^' And I finished writing the 50.000 words in 20 days.. And I'm nowhere near done. I've even started finding ideas for book 2 and 3 in the series too!!!! I really have to thank NaNoWriMo for being so amazing and inspiring me tremendously so I got myself together and started writing this wonderful, wonderful story, which I love more than anything else by now. Thank you NaNoWriMo. You are my hero.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

WinterStory — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:13:04 +0530

I got mine from a dream.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

XCRunner21 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:16:36 +0530

Well I actually drew from my life for the characters and some of the things that my MC goes through. I've never experienced to two big plot points of my novel, but I've gone through a lot of the stuff that my MC deals with

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Ali_Wenstern — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:40:36 +0530

My story idea came from an actual experience. I was riding a horse that hadn't been taken out for a trail ride, being that he was a retired racehorse. Something spooked him and he started rearing up with me still on and wasn't listening to me at all. A few weeks later, I began thinking about how it would play out into a story and what would happen to someone if they had fallen off and was seriously injured. And, thus, my story was born.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

arualo — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:42:15 +0530

My story idea was formed from different ideas I have had for my other stories but have left out in the end. I decided to use those :)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Telcontar — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:45:54 +0530

Mine came from a wish. It was a slow day at work, and I started daydreaming about how much I wished certain stories were true. (I'll admit it - I was primarily thinking about Doctor Who :D). But I started to think about how in many ways, some stories were just too wonderful to NOT have happened, that it was almost tragic that such things, if they could be conceived, weren't a part of the real world. That's when I got the idea that muses inspired writers with all the marvelous stories of the universe too far away for people to know otherwise. That muses' real job was to take stories to wonderful or important to NOT tell and tell them. So, if this completely-unrelated-to-Doctor-Who story ever becomes a classic of its own, it owes its existence to the fact that Doctor Who is so completely wonderful lol.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

sarafinaipsum — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 02:08:26 +0530

Mine came from a video game idea which was almost nothing like how my story turned out.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Ghotay — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 03:19:38 +0530

The shower is a great place to come up with ideas! I also find it's a great place to really get revved up for writing. Like if I'm feeling a bit apathetic about writing, I'll take a shower and think about the scene/plot item/whatever I want to come next and I'll get lots of ideas for what I want to write and when I'm done I'll practically burst out of there, naked and dripping, and thrown myself onto the computer to get my write on. Or something like that, anyway. Protip: I also do this for assignments that I don't want to start.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

fuzz — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 03:41:34 +0530

I actually don't know where my idea came from. That should be more worrying to me than it is.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Dani Marchand — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 03:47:05 +0530

This is one of the few stories where I actually set out to come up with a new plot, rather than just letting it come to me. Last February, I sat down early one morning and used a generator that gives you three plot elements to include. It gave me: Steampunk, Sculptor's studio, and Vengeance for a crime. The plot sparked from there and grew. It was about two people whose magic was so strong they had to be imprisoned, but because the government tried to appear humane, they were kept in a studio and given grants to make art. It was about a young noble girl whose parents, the king's closest advisers, were murdered. And that murder gave the prisoner's brother, the leader of an enemy nation, cause to invade with his pet project: a steam-powered and weapon-toting airship, the likes of which no one in the world had seen before. All of it fell together in my head the second I saw what the generator gave me, but there was so much plot and so many characters that I spent until November thinking it out, and now the first draft is finished!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Princeshelby — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 03:52:15 +0530

Elton John, my English teacher's husband's habit of coming into class randomly and writing quotes on the board, high school orchestra, and my Civics teacher's long flashback/lecture on the Cold War.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Airen Rin — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 05:06:28 +0530

Watching people walk down the streets with their headphones on. Then I wondered what they think about while listening to music. Nearly getting run over because I forgot to look both ways before crossing while listening to music. Then I thought about them gaining powers and if they actually cared about having the powers at all - being so absorbed into their own world. Things kind of went off from there.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

your biggest fan — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 05:50:53 +0530

I acutally got this ideal in 2009. My FMC won a beauty pagent and I've been basically writing about all the ways her life has gone wrong since she won the crown

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Marie16 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 05:50:53 +0530

At a doctor's appt, watching a beautiful woman working. Somehow she instantly became a character in my mind. And that character soon had a backstory and a life. Also, bits of this story actually came from last year's NaNo. Little pieces of last year's NaNo seemed to fit really well with this particular character, so I took the ideas and re-wrote them and shaped them into this story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Matuami — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 06:31:15 +0530

Thinking back on it, I got my idea from NaNoWriMo 2007 or 2008. My two main characters for this one were the adopted children of the antagonist who ran away from their home world. The idea started out as something that had to do with assassination and empire-toppling and exile for treason, now that I think about it. Three rewrites later, it's got almost nothing to do with the original idea besides having two codependent siblings as the main characters. I think I might have kept their names, but not their ages or appearance.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Kittycat4ever — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 07:14:42 +0530

I got mine during the summer on a hike with my family. I was looking around and suddenly I remembered that I wanted to do Nano and that I should start to think of some plots to think about. I almost forgot it but I remembered a few days before the first.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

GatsbyGal — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 07:20:30 +0530

Hell to the yes, sleep is a wonderful thing. I can't even count how many characters and story ideas were derived from my dreams.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

GatsbyGal — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 07:26:29 +0530

The one I came up with a few weeks ago was inspired by a Blind Guardian song about The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates by John Milton. I decided to research the book, which was published shortly before the execution of Charles I. And I realized I really didn't know anything about the whole King Charles/Oliver Cromwell business (I knew OF them, but not ABOUT them or the events surrounding them), so I researched that too and found it insanely interesting. Upon reading Charles' last interaction with his young daughter, I actually found myself sympathizing with him really badly, and I felt the need to explore that in a story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

lostservice22 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 08:36:39 +0530

I read the last Harry Potter book, and sure it was a great story but for me personally I felt that there was a lot missing between the end of the battle and the epilogue that would be important to see. So I wrote it.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

myviolettears — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 08:37:55 +0530

Most of mine came from an epiphany, my friend and I were trying to come up with novel ideas and mine just popped up. So I worked on characters and setting and plot and by the time the first rolled around, I was ready.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

everqueen — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 09:59:36 +0530

I was thinking about how people romanticize the past, particularly in the US for the 1950s. Then I was thinking of the ideal part of history in my opinion, and came up with the Middle Ages, but with all our medicinal advances. I thought it'd work really well for NaNo I made up a world where most of the people live an idealized version of the Middle Ages, but they think it's actually the fourteenth century. And that led to a global cataclysmic event and a world-wide suppressive gov't, and it went from there.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

MystShadow — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:16:47 +0530

My story started with a single scene which popped into my head when Kylie Minogue's "Wow" randomly came up when i had my ipod on shuffle. Everything just sort of expanded from there.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Shinzu — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:38:27 +0530

Well, my entire world is based upon a single arc in the One Piece anime. Or, well, the prison is, and the world is based off of whatever the heck I want. XD (I play way too much Spore for my own good) And then I had these characters that I loved, but I knew so much about them that come October, I was like, 'I don't wanna write about these guys! I need someone new!' So I decided to just leave it alone for a while and come back for it later. Obviously 6 hours of Assassin's Creed is not good, as in my mind, I decided that my main character would be my original main character's great granddaughter who ends up finding herself in her great grandmother's body. Then I planned on having a race of half human half poison dart frog people. After hearing stories about my friend's new chameleon, those poison dart frogs turned into chameleons...who were secretly leading an army of leopard geckos (which is what I own XD). And it all started from an arc of One Piece.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Christina Huling — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:40:37 +0530

Mine started with a character questionnaire that I had to fill out for a class. My original character was adopted, her parents had never told her, and when she found out, she went looking for her real parents. However, I couldn't come up with a single original reason why that would be difficult or interesting or why anyone would be trying to stop her from finding them (I don't play well with internal-conflict-based premises), so I set her aside. I liked her, but at that time, she was boring. A few months later, I was doing something totally unrelated and thinking about an episode of NCIS in which Tony and Ziva had to go undercover as married assassins because the real assassins were dead/killed (I don't remember which). One of the revelations in the episode was that the real female assassin was three months pregnant when she died/was killed. So I started wondering what would happen to the baby if the mother hadn't been killed (I'm pretty sure she was killed). Suddenly the two thoughts clicked and I realized that baby and my poor boring adopted girl were one and the same. Bam! Instant plot, just add paper. This also presented another motive, because suddenly she had a boyfriend from a rival group of assassins who got killed because he was with her, even though she didn't know she was an assassin. So then she was also seeking revenge for his death, but (and I can say this now because I changed the ending) originally her parents were going to be the ones who killed her boyfriend. Nothing personal, but he was a rival in a cutthroat (bad pun) business. That is how Morgan Cassidy Anne Bellefaire came to be. I am eternally grateful to the writers of NCIS.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

bravrayj — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:11:50 +0530

Mine came from mostly rejected and/or unused ideas from my long runner. 1. Originally, two secondary characters were supposed to have a kinship with the aloof big brother type and an extreme doormat girl being friends and possibly dating (but unlikely). Due to plot changes, that subplot was dropped completely. Who knows though; that story is still not complete, and we could see hints of it later on, but it's not going to be developed very much. 2. Dylan was originally supposed to be a rival to my MC, a bit standoffish against her, matching up with similar powers. Eventually, what pushed it over the edge is that he grew to become similar to one of my secondary characters, one that I was planning to kill off. Since I didn't want to 'lose' an interesting character like him, I decided to somewhat export more aspects of his personality into Dylan. With this, Dylan needed his own story, not one where he was bogged down. 3. Related to that, Jovita was also based on a character that had less screen time than expected. Expect that Jovita has little self-esteem and it seemed to shrink over development and world building. The lightning powers were mostly because I had a lightning based villain that I was writing about around the time I originally got the idea. A bit unrelated to the ongoing story, I wanted to have a partner tandem with two teens working together for some time, wonder twins style. In my initial idea, their powers were supposed to be connected from the beginning, but that got pushed back to the end by the time I was seriously planning for nano. The climax came later, but this was inspired more by a JRPG that I was playing back in October [Paper Mario: TTYD] than my own ongoing works. Much of my ideas that came after was filling the gaps and building proper character development. A bunch of the ideas came from subconscious thoughts, including the theme, tying into something I was dealing with as of late.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

thesunscreen — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:00:55 +0530

[quote=warrchylde] ... let's face it; we cannot define the righteous without the wrong. [/quote] I love that concept, I built my own religion around this thought called balance. The universe is based on oposits, light, dark, good, evil, right and wrong. Life is in the grey areas.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

thesunscreen — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:08:38 +0530

That just popped an idea in my head about a retired race horse coming out of retirement . Something along the lines of a young girl revitalizing the animal and it remembering what running is all about. A feel good story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

RedBanjo — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:40:58 +0530

I had just discovered Nanowrimo, and I decided a minute later to attempt it. I realised I needed a story that would have to reach over 50k, so I quickly came up with a problem that my characters couldn't solve in 5 mins (they'd have to take a long journey). Then it all sort of happened at once. Took me 10 mins. Seriously. I'm not sure how or why. And I don't know if I could do it again. I didn't have an ending, a bad guy, or anything other than setting, characters, and problem. But I knew I could write a book with what I had.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Chibi-chan — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:45:52 +0530

My ideas pretty much ALWAYS come from dreams. I tend to have very detailed and often weird dreams. they are my number 1 source of inspiration.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Hepatica — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:03:31 +0530

A dream, which became the first chapter - and, also, the end of the whole novel! lol! So, in order to get to that point, I then jumped back about 20 years & started looking at their lives at that point & the thing just wrote itself! Haven't finished yet, either.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

poiama — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:13:41 +0530

So I like to have my idea by September so that I have all of October for research, and in November I write write write!!! However by the middle of this September I was freaking because I didn't have any idea what to write at all. So I went on last year's NaNo forums but instead of the adopt a plot thread I went to the adopt a title thread. And I know most authors will tell you DO NOT write to a title but I was hoping one of the titles would spark an idea and it DID!!! So thank you to the person who left to be adopted Cherry Pies & Gunpowder, I have a story that everyone keeps telling me needs to get written and that they need to read it when I am done!!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

poiama — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:18:03 +0530

I just saw that episode of NCIS!!!! I'm pretty sure someone from NCIS shot them but am not 100% positive!!!! I also wondered what would have happened to the baby if the baby had lived so I must now read your book!!!!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

WriteYourHeartOut123 — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:27:34 +0530

At first, I thought it was totally a stroke of genius (since I decided to do this Oct. 28 and had no idea what to do), but a week in, I was talking to my best friend and I realized where I got it from. Her and I, when we were, like, six, played a game that we would play for hours and hours and for a couple of years, in fact. I don't remember the exactly what the adventures were did were, but the idea was... amazing. Such brilliant little kids.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Day.In.Everyones.Shoes — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:04:50 +0530

Mine stemmed from finding a little swallowtail caterpillar on the carrot plants in my high school garden, and deciding to raise him; but the real main idea came from a series of things going on in my town. So loosely based on life, I guess, but fictionalized in most all of the storyline.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Arlequin — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:13:56 +0530

Discovering Downton Abbey back in January made me want to write something about the mid-1910s. My novel was the result.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

RubyMarlin — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:18:18 +0530

Whenever my mother and I visit a new town, we explore a cemetery or two. When we were in Pennsylvania, we found the most beautiful cemetery I've ever seen in my entire life. In that cemetery, I saw a headstone that read "All the World's a Stage and All the Men and Women Merely Players." as the epitaph and ten completely unrelated names underneath with no dates. The wheels started turning...

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Chumsy17 — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:44:21 +0530

A dream. I saw a tough girl escaping from a club, then she was found by a young cop. Their eyes met, something passed between them, and he let her go. The only things that are still the same are the tough girl on the run and eyes meeting. But it was still the starting point.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Sunshine Cat — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:29:44 +0530

I'm really not sure. In fact, I don't even remember what my original idea was. It's changed so much that you can't even see it, at all.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

J.E.Blackworth — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:36:39 +0530

Suits. Just plain black and white business suits gave me the idea for the antagonist. That sparked the whole story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

ModestTreasure252 — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:43:26 +0530

I was listening to "The Future Holds a Lion's Heart" and "How to Build a Time Machine" by Darren Hayes and originally I thought about writing a story about a time traveler. Then, I decided to take a different route and thought about traveling through different realms. Suddenly, the entire plot changed, characters changed, and a story idea appeared in my mind.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

gryffindor.socks — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:46:03 +0530

My idea (or rather, a recurring image in my story) came to me in a dream sometime in early October. I woke up and scribbled it out on an index card next to my bed and went back to sleep. When I woke up a bit later, I deciphered my sleepful chicken scratch and threw it in my writing journal. I stewed on this image (hundreds of red balloons holding up tiny candles in the sky) until I got the idea for my High School Reunion plot line. It didn't turn out exactly how I wanted so I'll retool it and revisit it in a few months once I forgot what I wrote about. For now I have another idea I'm trying to flesh out that came to me in the middle of Nano. It got shelved in the writing journal until this week. Now to get the motivation to write it!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

larelmian — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:58:23 +0530

Bits and pieces of it came from different places. I first came up with the protagonist, Micah, in my 2006 NaNo -- working on his back story showed some real promise. Randy (under a different name) appeared in my 2007 NaNo. One scene showed me how manipulative this character could be, and that has only grown. The basic plot idea showed up in one of the weekly forums when the speaker (I believe his name is Ron Carter, or something like that) spoke of the unsung heroes of the Revolutionary War. The story of how one spy reported to George Washington was very intriguing. It took a little while to turn all this over in my mind, but I started writing it 2008. How then did I do it for NaNo? I found a totally different angle and decided to finish the darn thing. I'm a bit of a NaNo Rebel.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Bicicletta — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:39:27 +0530

Three ideas that came together: 1. I was walking home from work at night after a rain, and noticed how the late hour and the glistening roads transformed everything - perfectly ordinary buildings looked glamorous and mysterious. I began to think of a character who preferred the night to the day, because the night-time world seemed closer to what she wanted it to be. 2. I read about a type of brain damage that gives the person the sensation of never being alone, that there is always someone standing just behind you, who deftly moves out of sight when you turn. I wondered what life would be like for someone for whom this is real, not the result of a brain injury. Who are the sensed but never seen shadow people? What do they want? 3. This led me to the old belief that mental disorders were the result of demonic possession. I came up with a woman who has been diagnosed as bipolar, and treated for it, but actually another being inhabits her body. There turned out to be a number 4: my "demon" is a refugee from a dying world, and finds itself trapped here.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

mycatduncan — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:22:06 +0530

Well, I was struggling to decide between to plots I was equally excited about. I couldn't choose, so I decided to "wing it" with a whole new idea. I believe the idea of "The Lost Monarchy" being set in a fictional kingdom was due to the facts that a) I didn't want to research actual kingdoms and b) it's so much easier to write about a place where you make up the rules and culture. That way, you can't go wrong. I really don't know where the plotline came from: a little girl is a dancer in a Langourian city (Langour is the kingdom), and she aspires to attend the Trades Academy to become better at ballet (in turn, so that she can one day dance for the queen of Langour). Then her father explains to her that she cannot enroll in the Trades Academy because she is ill, and indeed that most of the children her age are ill as well. She questions why, and her father tells her there was a horrible plague when the girl was a baby and that many children were affected. Now the afteraffects of the plague will threaten their lives unless they undergo a five-month-long, agonizing curing process during which their memories will be clouded/tarnished. The girl's best friend frees himself during the curing process, and, because the process had gone on for so long, his memories are all but erased. However he gets the feeling that the girl was important to him and frees her as well. They decide that the king's faraway palace holds special meaning to them and make it their mission to get there and figure out what has happened to them. They attend the Trades Academy (paying with stolen money from the girl's house), arrive at the palace, and begin to decipher secrets that were supposed to be hidden from their entire generation. As their memories slowly return - thanks to the reunion with another friend - and the king's secrets start to fall into place, they start to realize what a horrifying story their own past really was. See? That's grim. I don't know where I even got that. 0_o

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

thesunscreen — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:41:35 +0530

That sounds like a good story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Declaro — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:18:42 +0530

Actually, my original concept for this story was as an AU fanfic. Last year, I signed up to try and do the fanfic100 on LiveJournal, where you write 100 different little stories based off a character, setting, whatever, and I chose the Fifth Doctor from Doctor Who. I had this idea for a story where the Doctor was a retired cricketer, and his companions were renters who came and went, and how the Doctor would live and die there and how it had been passed from each incarnation to the next. Anyways, I wound up deciding it was a better idea for an original story, and I've done my best to keep it from feeling too much like the show's characters. The setting, at least, is so different that I don't have to worry on that point.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

mycatduncan — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:30:31 +0530

@thesunscreen: Thanks. I haven't even gotten the MCs out of the Academy yet, so the plot following that is subject to change. I know what I want the chraracters to find out, but since I did a lot of time skips, I want to make sure the rest of the plot is long enough so that it makes an impact.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Rensy — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:10:20 +0530

I got my idea from a Vocaloid PV. It was meant to be a harmless, short fanfiction but then I got ideas for side characters and the personalities of the main characters changed so much to the point where there was no way it would count as fanfiction. But it was an uber great idea and I couldn't possibilty pass it up~

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

bloodonmytypewriterkeys — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:05:40 +0530

I attended a speech by theologian Peter Vardy. Someone asked him if he thought there would ever be one world power, and he said he doubted it, but the world might eventually merge into three or four. Hence the premise of my novel: the world has divided into three warring world powers.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

BloodRoseAngel — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:32:41 +0530

Mine came from a sudden love of androids that I developed after reading Chobits for the first time (though thankfully, my novel has turned out quite different to Chobits XD It's got kind of a Blade Runner thing going on apparently, although I've never actually seen Blade Runner, so I bought it just so I can see whether I've made my story too similar to it. xD) As for a lot of the backstories and ideas, like a few other people, I had those "Aha!" moments in the shower XD You know when you really want a pen and paper to scribble your latest idea down and you can't because... well, you're showering! =P

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

BloodRoseAngel — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:34:02 +0530

Oh, and in the past I've only ever written high fantasy, but NaNo seems to be subtly pushing new things into my writing - my NaNo 2010 novel became fantasy/steampunk/romance and this year's is sci-fi/cyberpunk, so it's a challenge, but fun! XD

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

rehtse — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:49:47 +0530

Mine started out after I saw a news report about a cops kid being arrested. Then I thought about how much it would suck if someone got arrested by their own father. Then that spiralled into a two page idea that included a futuristic world, conspiracy, and superpowers ;)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

onlyobsess — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:36:55 +0530

I was reading Patty Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest, and there was this photo in it. And I thought, how much would that suck, to be in a covered wagon train, and watch a train pass you by? And eventually, that became the talking point for my MC, a woman who journeys along the Oregon trail, a dream that isn't necessarily hers, and is haunted by the trains speeding by. Well, there's more to the story than that. But that's where it started.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Kiwi-kauri-kid — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:51:57 +0530

This is so cool, I love seeing how novel's originated and how they've grown 8'D Mine... started off as fanart for a fanfic. No, I'm entirely serious: I had been reading a fanfic before bed (can't remember what now, haha) and could not sleep. This being around August '09, I decided to go my typical route: draw. So I started drawing several scenese from the fanfic, once of which had a male character. I had pictured him at about fourteen, black hair, black clothes, (white shirt), and skate shoes. Colouring the hair at a weird angle and thought, 'wait let's make this black - and - white' so I did. Sometime between then and the next day I decided to turn him into a character (named after a new teacher at school haha) and started writing a story. With no actual idea of where I wanted the plot to go xD Since then, the makeover has been astounding... still have the original copy of the 'novel' (or what was written of it) and pleased to find that plot holes = mostly gone, characters = (hopefully!) not as cardboard or cliche as they were. Hopefully. I'm so proud of them <3

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

haubs — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:24:50 +0530

Mine originally started off as an idea for a short story. It was inspired by how the main character in The Time Traveler's Wife suddenly appears and disappears suddenly and how you can miss someone so much you feel like a part of you is missing. Originally the story was going to be about something completely different, where the main character who can be in two places at once would literally leave body parts behind sometimes, but I couldn't make that work and I needed something for him to do. I toyed with a bunch of different ideas, and thought of making it a romance where he kept suddenly popping up near a woman who he eventually would fall in love with, but I couldn't make that work either. I don't know how but the idea of him befriending a teenage girl came into my head and the whole popping up near people randomly became an important plot point, even though he fakes being drawn to her in a dream. The story is completely different than I originally thought, and his power is only actually used about once in the entire story, instead of being what it is actually about.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Arilella — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:12:00 +0530

Mine derived from a nickname a radio presenter has on my local radio station, which is in fact the name of my main character, Lilypants. I then derived from this a whole story about an unravelling golden thread, a land, four elders who rule it and are all good at different spells or powers, a love interest, an evil rebel wizard, and other things. As I wrote it I had several plot ideas and twists that ended up in my first rough attempt at fantasy. I also had a great dream with a great idea for a novel at some point during the next year or so, or I could work on it and use it for nano 2012 :)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Earthsick — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:30:26 +0530

I was half asleep when I thought about what to write for Nanowrimo. Then I thought to myself: Why not write generic fantasy for once? And tried sleeping. Then, suddenly, the summary for my plot popped up in my head and from that on I built the story on every crazy idea I had. <3 Turns out this is not so generic after all. I also remembered that I wanted to do a story once in a while that had a typical supporting character as the main character.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

WiresInABox — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:46:10 +0530

My first idea was to write a bunch of short stories based on fairy tales, with the same characters in each of them but with different POV and storyline in each short story. But then I thought it was a greater idea to weave it all together so I did.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

HatchetGirl — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:54:24 +0530

I remember mine perfectly. When I was drifting off to sleep, an image came into my head. It was of a girl standing at the end of one dark and dreary street, and a sign welcoming a person into the next street, which was bright and wonderful. I started to alter the image until it became an idea for my NaNo novel!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

moromis — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:12:03 +0530

Made it all up, but the initial thought was, "I want to create an epic plot with an overarching theme of the universe ending with a few hypotheses on the nature of time."

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

scammer — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:25:17 +0530

I don't really remember where I had gotten the original idea -- it's evolved over the years and has become something else completely.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

LadyMage — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:32:17 +0530

I got mine from "CSI" and "The Will". Don't ask, my muse is strange.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Nanuchka — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:30:21 +0530

Believe it or not my story idea came from Hilary and Bill Clinton -- except I changed the outcome. Would love to see it published one day. I can only dream

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

streamergurl — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:56:02 +0530

A laundry detergent commercial showed clothes being tortured. I had a dream that night about a girl being tortured on the rack. Her family watched nearby, and there was some provision that could have let her walk away without being punished. After watching the girl in the dungeon, I knew she wanted to leave, she had the option to leave, but for some reason she chose not to. I woke up and started figuring out who that girl was. Thus my 2011 NaNo novel was born. The punishment scene changed to a whipping, but it turned out to be the basis from my story. Be careful what you watch before bedtime...

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

dutchbando — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:39:16 +0530

My story idea originated from a Star Wars fanfic I wrote about ten years or more ago. Basically, I took the whole 'chosen one' premise of episodes 1-3 and turned them on its head. I wrote a what-if scenario of 'what if the Emperor had a daughter and she was the chosen one'? I no longer write star wars (or any other) fanfic but I thought the premise was interesting enough that I adapted it to a world from one of my previous nano-novels. Its worked surprisingly well so far.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Monica_Brown — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:48:58 +0530

I dreamed I was shot in the 1940's by a Nazi general. That right there is a great story line--and easy to build off of too.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Raye of Nyght — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:27:24 +0530

How story idea started: I played capture the flag in the dark with my youth group many years ago. I thought: wow wouldn't it make an interesting story if there was a world that operated sort of like capture the flag and wrote down one scene that popped into my head the next day. It was only a page in a very small notebook. And it sat there. Then I gathered all my writings together about two years ago, stuck the now ripped paper in the "miscellaneous will not likely touch again" folder. Then this year I was introduced to NaNoWriMo. For ideas I dug through old writings trying to find an idea that was not too formed already. I ended up pulling out that scene, began to imagine why my main character could "see" things others couldn't (the whole seeing what others couldn't is mainly what my scene was talking about at the end). Then wrote 50K words and am definitely off track from my original thoughts about it. XD But it has been very fun to see this story unfold and very easy for me to branch off of that small idea I had.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

missamanda12 — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:35:20 +0530

wait, i don't think my story has an idea.... i haven't really gotten to the plot yet.... O.o um.. a bunch of guys have to save a bud of theirs from being a vampire forever... but i am a girl, i just find that i like writing boy heros

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Animalious — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:44:59 +0530

It was starting with a new character for an rp that stopped before it started and what surprised me was that I took more than just my character, however because the rp didn't get far. I hope to god that I had taken something of a cookie cutter character and made them more developed. Than from there this little world had started to form around them. Which followed by some attempt at a story line. Which I have to work on still I've discovered this November. Just not today...I'm in a slump. If no one read that, it could be described as Eve and Adam making an earth of there own, which was destroyed by zombies XD

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

thatnola — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:35:21 +0530

The bones of mine came from a dream. But the story that eventually it morphed into something else, and the original dream has almost nothing to do with the story!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 04:18:11 +0530

Death Note, of course. Because my sister wanted to make a roleplay/fanfiction with all original characters and I said it couldn't work because it had such an an already structured plot... But then it worked, of course.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

sarahlucielle — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 04:28:11 +0530

It actually came about because of a series of drawings I did. I created these characters visually and then I decided they needed a story. Now I've got at least three books planned with these guys.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Lilia Sparks — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 04:35:17 +0530

Mine came from the combination of a movie I ADORE!! And two books I really liked. The Outsiders and Uprising. So yeah. (<--- See?)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Enna-Isilee — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:33:33 +0530

Mine came from three songs, each providing a different aspect of my novel: Uprising: dystopia! Rebellion! Resistance: romance. Lots of it. Time is running out: the character Jem. The songs are by muse.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

ig_nobleigh — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:49:34 +0530

I think people only say "don't write to a title" in the sense that you shouldn't keep your story going in a rigid direction that's no longer working just so you can keep the title you originally outlined the story under. I think using a prospective title as inspiration is basically just using a writing prompt, in which case that's a-okay.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

maggiep — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:23:19 +0530

my grandparents. it is basically their story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

ig_nobleigh — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:05:28 +0530

My idea was inspired by the myth of Cassandra. Myths vary but basically she had hte gift of prophecy but was cursed so that no one would believe her prophecies. She predicted the fall of Troy but was ignored. My main character has a similar curse. She has visions of things like crimes, suicides, etc but it is a curse passed down in her family, she can't stop the visions from happening no matter what she does. Other things got tied into the story as well so it's not a retelling of the myth, but that's where I got my inspiration.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Celtic Forest Dweller — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:54:44 +0530

A dream. Of course! :) I got up the next morning and wrote out a brief synopsis based on it, complete with character names, and there it was. I let it sit in my "to be written" list, and when I needed a break from my current project, I picked it out for Nano.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

rachum_05 — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 02:11:50 +0530

I read a Glee fanfic that sparked the idea, actually, and at first I wasn't going to do it because I felt it was too similar to the original idea, but then it kind of kept growing and changing and taking New Directions (har, har) and when November came around, I decided it was different enough from the original to write!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Sarcastic_R_Us — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 02:28:52 +0530

I was listening to my iPod and Kris Allen's cover of "Heartless" came on. The line "He lost his soul to a woman so heartless" caught my attention and it just snowballed from there.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

AnAgelessTime — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 03:29:03 +0530

The story I wrote for Nanowrimo was probably about a year in the making based out of a much bigger idea that I've had for at least a decade. I once got a very good story within seconds and had planned out several plot points over three novels within four hours.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Piper the Perfect — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:52:37 +0530

One word: Webkinz. My original premise was extremely girly, with still a twinge of darkness(I don't know where that came from. Honest!). I had a webkinz buddy who sent me a webkinz studio. Grab a pirate set, grab a couple of pirates, and the story just started flowing out. And low and behold. The first book(it's kind of the first book? It's complicated) is almost finished! :D

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

egyptianprincess12 — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:56:08 +0530

I snorted when I read the part about new directions.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Carpe Verba — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:18:14 +0530

Does daydreaming count? I was originally going to use this for a short story we had to write in school, but I was never really happy with how it turned out. So when NaNo came around, I decided I would resurrect it. And by "it," I mean the underlying world is the same, and my old MC is remembered as a minor character, but everything else was a "seat of my pants" sort of thing. I'm /much/ happier with this one! :D

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

pastmeetspresent — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:56:52 +0530

I got my idea from the song Manhattan Project by Rush. I remember it quite well.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

everyoneelsehasthoughtofmyothernames — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 07:44:10 +0530

I was writing (well, talking, and thinking about writing) with my cousin on vacation in july, and we were discussing all sorts of things. Somehow, a scene popped into my head of a girl, dressed in finery, running out of a burning castle, holding the hand of a boy, and falling into the moat. It stayed in the back of my head for some time, but eventually, it popped up around NaNo time. I began to write the girl's story (then, I only knew that the girl was fourteen, she had been dancing with the guy at a ball for her birthday, and the fire was not an accident), and it grew into something of it's own.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Apiecalypse — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 07:47:52 +0530

I was sitting down mid-October, figuring I oughta come up with something before November 1st. I wondered what variations I could use on the classic stories. So my story basically ended up being a 'second gen' fic, except it was original. So my MC had a faulty version of the chosen one's power (since he was his son), and I made sure to emphasize that the parents had a whole culture of their own left over from the past.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Hannah_S — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:30:57 +0530

So, one day I realised that I was in the mood to do some writing, so I got out my laptop and started. The opening few paragraphs amused me so much that I continued. Before I knew it I had written a whole book. This has now happened twice. I don't plan the characters or what I'm actually going to do; I just start writing and see what rubbish falls out. The first of the two books that were written this way... well... I'm very fond of it, but it needs serious work before I can even consider doing more work on it, but the second time, this is the series that I'm working on now. A five book series which gets to use almost everything that I love- my obsession about Japanese culture, dragons, fantasy in a modern setting, mild insanity, food, bad puns, Pop culture references without being too obvious about them and randomness! Only after finishing the first book I managed to get blocked... three times. I managed to go through four edits of the first book, but still haven't finished the second. For NaNo I was going to write the rest of book 2 and then do book 3 as well, but my OCD didn't like that idea, and so I decided to put 2 on hold and go straight into 3. However, I now have various planning documents and things. Some of the stuff that the characters go through and talk about, that's taken from personal experience, other stuff is just "I like it, so it's going in!" only not quite as badly as I just made it sound! i write the story I think I would like to read, so there are so many things in there that are taken from my life, or my experiences twisted around to make it fun, though I don't make this obvious. For example; I have worked a number of jobs, mostly behind a counter, dealing with mangers, co-workers and the general public. In my book there is one character who owns her own business and two of the others work with her. She tries to find a new member of staff in order to help run things when she can't- EVERYONE who applies for the job is based on someone I've worked with and they have been treated the way I wanted to treat them, and most of the customers who are described are people I know, or people I've served! They would never know of course! I'm very, very careful about that one.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

memilypoo — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:50:35 +0530

same! The seed is always dreams, whether it's a plot, a setting, or even just a word or a phrase. This year's NaNo was based off a dream-though the dream definitely lost focus towards the end haha

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

rachum_05 — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:17:07 +0530

=D I giggled when I pictured someone snorting at my post, haha!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Cenlyra — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 03:03:59 +0530

My NaNo came from my Camp novel. Which flew into my head, pretty well formed, from browsing the adopt-a-title threads. Camp novel was a fantasy where a group of questers tried to unite four of the five magical Stones, so they could use them to defeat the evil sorceress who owned the fifth one. And NaNo was history/backstory/creation myths from that universe.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

GermanMickey — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 03:59:17 +0530

A manga I had read mixed with Rihanna's song, We Found Love In A Hopeless Place. It just came like an epiphany one day, and now my story is pretty far off from both while still having bits of each

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Angryman — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:03:22 +0530

HA! I have so many story ideas, it's hard to keep track of all of my inspirations. But I'll list the ones I can remember. Please note that these are NOT in any particular order. 1. Back in high school, I had a dream where I was getting married to the beautiful German foreign-exchange student. But it wasn't her that I was interested back then, so the marriage was an arranged marriage. I decided to write a story based around that concept. 2. Last year, my sister moved away and lived on the coast for a while. I was kind of depressed for at the beginning, so I started forming a story idea based on our sibling relationship, and placed it in a modern world with magic, monsters and firearms. 3. Final Fantasy gave me the ifrit. I played around with the idea of Ifrit Armor for a Final Fantasy character, then I decided to write my own story with the Ifrit Armor serving as an important item. 4. My dad and I both used to play D&D, and between the two of us, we have some great stories. So I decided that I need to write and adventure comedy/satire that has as many of those great stories as possible. 5. I came up with a character for the manga Yu Yu Hakusho. Then it evolved into a couple of characters. Next thing I know, I have a whole cast of Deaths that need a real home in a story. It's Dead Like Me meets The Office. 6. The Halo universe is so open, it's hard NOT to find potential stories in it. I have two. 7. This one, I'm not actually doing the writing, but I'm definitely a co-creator: Kingdom Hearts inspired my dark-powered hero, but it wasn't until he met my sister's characters (who are pretty much The Fates) that he finally had his own story. Rad is a character whom has gone through many changes since his initial creation almost 10 years ago, but I'm glad that he finally has a story to call home.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Embyr_is_Embyr — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:55:44 +0530

Hmm...I had some other story idea which I discarded, but I still wanted to keep one of the characters (or at least, their appearance; the character in question is some sort of huge cat-porcupine cross.) So I decided to change the plot and the other characters...My main goal was to NOT have this thing end up as some sort of love story. Somehow I ended up with a made-up race at war with dragons, and tons of plot holes that were miraculously patched up when I added vampires. I killed off...eh, twelve characters or so? Most of them were eaten by a dragon...

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

ddog125 — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:00:42 +0530

Mine came from my boyfriend actually. We were talking about dreams we have a night and he confessed that he dreamed of being a super hero, and described in detail what happened as a superhero. I know have a book called Zero to Superhero that features my boyfriends as the main character, me as the damsel in distress and my Ex-boyfriend as the villain.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

xandert — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 06:26:46 +0530

The idea for my NaNovel actually came to me while I was writing the prequel to it. I didn't write that first book with the intention of doing a sequel, but I got about 3/4 of the way through and the storyline for a sequel hit me like a brick wall. So I decided to write the sequel for NaNo. The idea for the prequel came to me from a song. Music affects me that way often.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Forsaela — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 10:57:06 +0530

My FMC and MMC already existed from little short fluffy stories I used to write, and the rest of the cast came from my years of roleplaying. I took my favorites (a.k.a. the cruelest ones with the more twisted psyches), and made them in turn the snarky b**** "good" character, the villain #1, and the villain Main. So basically... I think... I just threw the characters together into a world, had a vague sense that there was some Incredibly Dangerous Powerful Magic that the villain (already determined) had gotten ahold of, and an opposing Very Powerful Good Magic, and then... The story really just planned itself out from there. I was familiar enough with my dear VM to know what he would do with power. He's literally the catalyst for the plot of the entire book in more ways than one. It's been less of me going "hey, go do this so that they'll do that, and more of "wait what do you mean--OH DEAR GOD THAT'S WHY THAT HAPPENED/WHY THEY'RE LIKE THAT. WHY ARE YOU EVERYWHERE IN THIS BOOK." Heh... It's been one freaking heck of a ride. @v@

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

velvettouch_connectingdots — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:14:14 +0530

Mine came from listening to this one song on replay for two weeks.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Krykit — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:15:08 +0530

It started as a pen & paper RPG, but the game only ran for 2 sessions, and I was rather disappointed because I really liked my character concept. I wanted to explore it more, so I decided to write a story of my own featuring her.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

aliaswriter — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:54:13 +0530

I have no idea. It started out as a book that was supposed to be all letters between a guy and girl that had met when they were teenagers one summer, and become best friends. When he goes off to college, they continue to write, and eventually begin dating, but the whole time they're still separated by distance. They end up gettng married, but soon after, he gets sent off to war, so the couple continues to write to each other. The ending was supposed to be that he dies right before he was about to come home, and his wife just had a baby. So they never ge to be a family. The final letter was supposed to be her writing a goodbye letter to him. Then when i started writing this, I realized just how hard it was to write a story completely through letters. So I abandoned it. This new story has some elements from it, but is a new plotline. I have no idea where I came up with the new plotline.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Steampunk avi8or — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:50:50 +0530

Gym class heroes's song Stereo Hearts I was like, what if a girl was in love with a machine? It turned out very different from what I had in mind, and the person trapped in a machine ended up being the FMC's sister.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

darkblue627 — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:37:17 +0530

I've had the basic concept of mine for quite a while actually. It just started as an idea of reality and a separate but intertwined world of dreams. Then the plot just kind of kept changing, and somehow it ended up the way it is. I don't know, I've always been fascinated by dreams, so it just kind of took off from there. Of course, my story has not exactly gone the way I intended. I still am working to the same final scene I've had since the beginning, though.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Gwendolyn Butler — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:45:31 +0530

Mine came from combining 3 different ideas I had. I got the first one from shopping; it's always a good source for ideas because I hate it so much that my mind goes into complete overdrive trying to keep me from dying of boredom. The second idea kind of just popped into my head. It makes me pretty sad to mash it up with the other stories, because I love it on it's own but I think that this will make that story even better. I might write the actual story someday, as this story is turning out very differently from that one. My third was from an idea of a futuristic society in which a class of people spends their entire life in solitude devoloping relationships and spying for the government on a very advanced kind of internet and what would happen when one of the common people intrudes. That idea I got in the middle of orchestra class. Music is so inspiring! :) Dreams have fueled ieas for other novels but not neccesarily this one. I find it interesting that a lot of people say that dreams are their inspiration because aren't dreams supposed to be a mixed up version of things that happened to you thta day? I read that somewhere, anyway....

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

maggiep — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:04:49 +0530

My new story came from a dream, as I see is quite common. A girl standing at a window, wondering why the gunshots and war cries had ended. Fearing the silence almost as much as the sounds and wondering when the nightmare would end. I woke up and knew it had to be written down. It snowballed from there.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

kittenn1011 — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:51:54 +0530

This year, my Nanowrimo idea came from my hard-working mind. I had an old, vague idea that I started with (Character learning he's fictional) which I planned to never use, but when I got to October and realized I had no spare plot to spend this November with, I decided to take it and expand upon it.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

pammersw — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:01:28 +0530

I had a GREAT idea. Two weeks before NaNoWriMo began, I had character names, backstory, timeline, key scenes - nearly all the planning done (just two key scenes to go). Then, a bit over a week before NaNo began, I went on a hike to a spot overlooking Albuquerque. I looked over the edge, and said, "Imagine if you were up here and you saw Albuquerque get destroyed" - and that was the seed of an idea. I knew almost immediately it was a couple on a date. On the way back down, I discovered it was a couple on their SECOND date, and they'd just, independently, decided "not if he/she were the last one on earth." Funny how that works out, huh? ;) A week later, I had it all fleshed out, and started in at 12:01 a.m. on November 1.... I've got a pretty good idea of what happens in a sequel, and a vague idea for a second sequel, too. And there is always the original idea to come back to, also!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

PlasticSmoothie — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 02:44:18 +0530

I've been thinking about this for a while... And the answer is.. I don't know. It was a story idea that I had had for a while, but kept changing and getting better and better in my head. It's still changing, but at least writing 50k of first draft helped me make some final decisions on things! I did get inspired by all the books I've read the past few years, though. ;D

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Celticsmc12 — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:07:04 +0530

Well, I was angry at my cousin,and sort of bored with my novel. So, when I sat down to write, I pulled up a new document, and wrote a paragrph on some guy killing my cousin. And it evovled into the full blown murder mystery FBi novel it is today.

Re: Right vs. Wrong

strawmelon881 — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:54:18 +0530

Hee. Edward Said: Orientalism. The concept of "the other" is apparently prevalent everywhere. XD~

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

AliceUnrequited — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 05:13:44 +0530

My title took over my story. Accidentally, of course. It didn't even come together to make sense until the very end, but it really was the guiding force behind this story. The actual idea came from a lecture in my World Music class, about the bata drumming ensembles of Cuba being used to call down gods to possess people. Add that to a discussion on arranged marriages on the forums here, and I got a political-religious structure where the kings secure divine right by marrying a priestess possessed by a goddess. Except not. And then the king dies.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Alpina'sQuill — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:30:06 +0530

Dibs Nestle Crunch Ice Cream Bites.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Webgoji — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:15:03 +0530

I mined the idea for my NaNo manuscript out of the rock pile of seeing my sons watching the movie "9". I saw it and thought, that's some neat imagery and a cool concept to have characters that are created by people. But what if the characters were biological? Created to fight against something . . . something that killed . . . no, something that made the humans leave the planet. After much mental digging, I have my manuscript. My last manuscript was mined from several sources including a game called Requiem, "Raining Blood" by Slayer, Doom, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" . . . numerous sources. My next project I've mined from a topic I saw on this NaNo website; monster as the main character? I thought, yeah, but you're always going to end up with a sympathetic monster, never a real . . . ooooo, I've got it!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Prudence Fang — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:26:05 +0530

My idea came from my Shakespeare Conquest class. We were discussing Romeo and Juliet, and for some reason I was thinking about angels and aliens when we were talking about how Romeo and Juliet fell in love. Then I started thinking about an angel falling for a demon. And then I was thinking about the kind of child they would have together and how his or her life would be.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

fantasychallange7 — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:01:03 +0530

I was listening to a Blood on the Dance Floor song and one line caught my attention. From there, a character blossomed! (That's probably a terrible way for a character to be created, just considering content of said lyrics, but hey! It worked!) Now he's all grown up and almost nothing like his original self; he even managed to bring me a plot to go along with his crazy self. XD (Which is a lot darker than I anticipated, but, it worked... >.> )

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

izzyhindle — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:30:49 +0530

I was walking home from school one day when I had a strange daydream about my ex-boyfriend about what would happen if he got me pregnant. One of the twists in the story also came to me at the time, but we worked around it in a different way than my characters do in the story. When I got home, I realized that it could be turned into a story, so I started writing. When NaNoWriMo came around and I abandoned the plot I had been working on for months, I remembered that story, deleted the paragraph I had already written, then started over.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

SemiAutoMadness — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 03:01:39 +0530

I was reading an article on a new unmanned submarine the navy commissioned. Then my husband and I were on our way to the store, and he was telling me about his story idea about a booky. I looked out the window and yellled, "Oh, S***!" After sufficiently freaking out my love, I told him that lightning had struck my brain and I was going to write a steampunk novel set in Scotland about a geologist searching for underwater caves when he and his crew come across the fabled Waterhorse. Since November was a bust for me, I have decided to give up my biggest distraction (facebook) until I've completed a manuscript ready for beta readers. :)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

maggiep — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 07:17:51 +0530

Lol, how did that happen?

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Ydenne — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 11:19:52 +0530

My idea didn't come from one source, instead it was a mixture of many ideas I've had over the years. However, the spark that lit up my mind and helped me create my idea mixture came from one source, and my main idea came from one other source. I was watching the movie Thor, and one of the characters introduces himself as Mr. Erikson, but later Thor takes it literally and addresses him and Son of Erik. I liked the concept of being named after your parents, so I started thinking about how a family lineage would work that way. A few days later, I was brushing my (very) long hair and thought about how hard it would be to take care of without modern conveniences. Then I thought, what if there was an fantasy adventurer character who insisted on traveling with long hair, despite spending hours taking care of it. So I thought up this little speech the character would give to another Adventurer who complained about her habits, and decided to make long hair an important part of her culture. This culture combined with the family name, resulting in the character Laerott Lorgifdunsdottir, who was major inspiration for my fantasy idea despite the fact that I scrapped her character really quickly. The idea of Laerott got recreated as Maellore Ophdrenin later, though.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

ChickenWing — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:48:28 +0530

I was watching 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' a few days before CampNaNo started and wrote the basic idea during those two months. For NaNo I then made a outline and re-wrote it

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

koritsaki — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:27:51 +0530

Mine was a real story. My mom bought a doll that creeped me out as a gift to my best friend and we kept her outside my bedroom until we gave it to her. So my dad decided to troll me and my younger brother by saying that the doll was possessed and got out of her box every night and went to the kitchen to eat cake. When we gave her to my friend, I warned her and her brothers that the doll was possessed. They said to us that the doll moved at night and so on, Sandra (the doll's name) became the best inspiration for scary stories. But my friend had enough and one day she told her mom to get rid of Sandra. (endless childhood imagination ftw) So, when I started NaNo, I remembered that story and started... well, dragging it out. What if our moms were witches and the doll was actually possessed by a demon trying to kill them and me and my friend because we would be the next witches? What if we followed the story when both me and my friend were older (in our twenties) and so on and the story was thus created.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Dancing Thunder — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 23:58:52 +0530

I am a visually oriented person. I love to surf art sites. Eventually I happen on a picture and it inspires me. I see the character and poof! The story leaps into my mind. Suddenly I know who they are, have an idea about their culture, their home and their needs. As I wander, then I'll see their friends, their enemies. The conflict coils around in my mind, throwing ideas at me to accept or decline. In no time at all I am aching to write, to discover more about them, see where they'll go and what they'll do. It's like I take the journey with them, caught up in a suspension of disbelief comparable to the one I experience when I read a really good book. The real world vanishes. Only the world linked to my keyboard and inner eye remains.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

arrawyn — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:19:34 +0530

I got the idea for my Nano as a continuation from my last novel...but it went a totally different direction form the first vague seed of the story - and the story really came around when I came up with the title of it -- and then that's when the story began to really form. Now I just need to come up with an idea for my NEXT novel!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

silverdream — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:39:23 +0530

My story took nearly 3 years to develop. The plot is a highly (HIGHLY) altered version of an idea I came up with in late 2009/early 2010 called "Children of the Rose", which was essentially me trying to build a story around a title I thought was kinda cool. Originally, it was the story of two warring religions who each have a legend about a Messiah who will appear to both faiths and settle once and for all which one was the "true path". 2 kids end up marked as the Messiah, and chaos ensues. This evolved into "Angels", a story of human/angel/demon wars, where the angels and demons turn out to be fae humanoids that humans gave religious significance due to their supernatural abilities. In the end, only two of the main characters (Lucy and Ilsa) were kept, with a previously central char (Georg Yates, originally called Georg Vesper) demoted to largely cameo status.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Amuoralzg — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 08:09:22 +0530

I just started writing. In the time leading up to it, I deliberately did not plan, so that I could, eg, insert random ninjas and a unicorn named Fern. I was going to copy and paste a first line from the Adopt an opening line thread but the copy didn't work so I just went with the sentence I happened to have copied before. And then the story grew, and grew, and it turned out that theh plot had nothing to do with that sentence at all, really, although I'm hoping to fix that. Lots of bits become irrelevant by the end, but they shouldn't be.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

AkitoAnemone — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:39:56 +0530

I drew a person inspired by the song Suicide Circus by the Gazette, and then I wanted to know more about that person...Pretty much the whole story came from that song.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Styrr_Cobalt_Indigo — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 03:09:45 +0530

It came from my dream.... (in my dream) I was in my room with my friend, and I pointed to a book with the title 'Green' and told her that it was a scary book. The last part before I woke up I said this: "We're both Greeners too, you know." My friend responds with, "I'm not a Greener." Thus, my story....?

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Fellow Writer — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:46:54 +0530

It varies from idea to idea. Sometimes I get inspired by dreams or by certain other series that I like. Other times, I would think of a certain concept I would like to write about and then I build my story around that concept.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

MissAngelAdorer — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:19:37 +0530

Watching the Coraline movie and rereading "The Phantom Tollbooth." I'd always loved these kinds of stories and wanted to write my own that was modern, American, and with a world specifically designed by the main character. It started as something different, but I'd say that since I started writing I've chosen a much better direction for it.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

madelinehayes — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 07:12:11 +0530

I was listening to Song of the Century by Green Day and I just had this image of a guy sitting in his bedroom window at night, smoking and singing it. Then as the song transitioned into 21st Century Breakdown, I saw that same guy walking out of his house - still smoking - and walking around this trashy neighborhood of a small town... It sort of progressed from there. I really loved the guy I saw and wanted to know more about him so... My novel is his story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

VGJekyll — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:23:22 +0530

I don't remember where I got my topic from. I was going to write about something different and found out on the 1st of November that I probably wouldnt be able to write more about it than once chapter. So I decided to read through this massive word doc in which I collect notes, quotes and idea's. There, I found one sentence that inspired me to write my NaNo-Novel. 'A boy with only one arm goes to a metal maker in the hopes that he can give him a metal arm.' That was all.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Vyctori — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:16:40 +0530

A random thought popped into my head while comparing anime fantasy and western fantasy, Where is African fantasy? After several hours without any real results I knew what I wanted to write.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

ALynnL07 — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:13:45 +0530

Oh wow, I haven't posted in this thread yet! I got my idea from a bunch of old notes/outline of a story that I never wrote back in 2006, when I was still in High School. I was inspired by one of my favorite manga at the time, Saiyuki, which was based of the original legend, Journey to the West (that I did some research on and fell in love with, if only it was in English!) I found the pages of my old notes while looking for spare notebooks and paper to write a fanfic I was entering in a contest at the time. I write better with pencil/pen/paper because there are less distractions than on the computer. My old notes were... well, some were incomprehensible, but I took the pieces I liked, added more details and got a new world, new characters, and new plot twists. I guess this goes to show, never throw out your old notes. You'll never know when you'll use 'em.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

kctejada — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:46:04 +0530

My idea came from being annoyed at my former college roommate, his girlfriend and two of our mutual friends. Okay, that sounds wrong, but here it goes: a few years ago, I was annoyed at these people for a large variety of personal reason's I won't get into. So much so that I scribbled down a treatment of a story where I had four heroes that acted like exaggerated versions of all of these friend's flaws and how these things ended up messing everything up-and yet, they're still regarded as heroes despite doing more damage then the villains. Somehow, I got the idea that this should be a parody of generic clicheified fantasy and decided, "might as well go all the way" and slapped on a few concurrent storylines, with the idea that all of these storylines will combine in the end. This got to an outline stage with only two scenes planned. Then I forgot about it, mostly because I was over that whole mess above and mostly because I didn't think it was that strong of an idea. Fast forward five years later-and I'm going through my idea vault for NaNoWriMo 2011. I have a few new ideas, a lot of old ideas (the oldest was 10 years old and I had rewritten the first 3 chapters twice) and I wasn't sure which one to pursue. I added this idea on the list as a joke, since I considered it the weakest idea I had. That is, until I started reading through it, and realized I could make the whole thing work as a deconstruction that starts off as a parody, but gets serious partway through the story. The result? A far better story then even I thought was possible. On that note, even if an idea seems weak, you can still make a good story around it.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

whitedove — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:41:33 +0530

I have been working on one this afternoon that combines a number of sources: 1. Like a year ago, my friends were watching video game trailers and in one there was a robot going along through a white landscape, which got me thinking about people trying to survive on an ice-planet and how they would treat the people who could keep their heating units functional. (Turns out he was in a desert. Go figure.) 2. I spent a lot of time in steel mills this past fall and kept thinking about building something like that/living in it (one of the buildings was so large clouds started forming in the roof). 3. I was reading this thread and someone mentioned plot element generators, so I googled them and found TV tropes' story generator. A few refreshes later I have a whole new character with his own private setting, a few possible subplots, and a shift in exactly why they are on this ice planet in the first place. The weird thing is, a lot of the new ideas are only loosely similar to the trope I was reading about when I thought of them. At best. But, seriously, how can you not do something with "shines like a neon angel" (from the "Shining City" trope if anyone is interested). So, now I am up to three stories to chose from next month when I have time to write again. Well, four actually, another post in this thread reminded me of the idea I had chosen not to try last Nanowrimo, which came from a combination of the movie 9, and a line from The Scientist (Willie Nelson's version) "Questions of science, science and progress, don't speak as loud as my heart." Consider this from the perspective of an engineer and you'll probably have a good idea where this is going.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

skymessenger — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:25:08 +0530

My more recent one came from a dream. it was extremely vague but it held so much emotion and action within it, i had to keep it around. Eventually it grew and grew, kept pestering me to shape it into something. seeing the idea before that fall into shambles, i focused on the new idea and became what it is now

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

overthehill — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 03:33:00 +0530

A number of friends had been pestering me to write something for ages when a fellow member of an unrelated forum posted about Nanowrimo. I joked to my husband, "Hey, what about this. What do you think?" And he said, "Go for it. I've been wanting you to do something like this for ages. I'll support you 100 per cent." It was already 2nd November. People who know them find my small, eccentric and slightly dysfunctional family an endless source of amusement. So the basic plot came about after about an hour's thought, by using various relatives as place-marker characters and putting them in a completely unrealistic situation. As I became more and more involved with the sheer challenge of writing, the novel developed a life of its own and (somewhat mercifully) my characters rebelled and took on new and unrecognisable personalities. I now have to go back and re-write the early part of the book to eliminate any remaining incriminating evidence of their origins ... as well as filling plot holes, writing a convincing backstory, adding a subplot and a couple of twists, etc. I'm hoping for about 90,000 words by the time I'm done. A lot of my ideas come to me in the wee small hours and I am forever tiptoeing to the office to make some notes on the computer without waking my husband. Actually, my husband is usually oblivious to my getting out of bed, but the cats aren't, and they usually manage to blackmail me into feeding them before they wake everyone with their shouting.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

overthehill — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 03:41:34 +0530

Sandia Crest?

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

karygurl — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:04:03 +0530

The last bunch of my ideas all come from dreams. Generally I dream of a very specific scene, and wake up and write as many details as I can because in the dream there's a backstory that totally makes sense but that's usually the first information I forget when I wake up! 2010's was a scene of a few people investigating an ancient tomb when a trap springs and a monster emerges to fight them. 2011's was a scene of a queen who rode to battle against pirates attacking a town close to the capital to find that the leader of the pirates is the prince she fell in love with and thought was dead. My idea for next year is actually just from a concept that I'm finding I'm loving. I read a lot of YA fiction and I kept thinking, it's always the main character who finds out they have powers and have to cope. What about a story from the point of view from the best friend, who watches their friend go through this process and is dragged along with it? I'm having a blast with it! It's like writing two stories in one, the story of the friend with the powers and then my main character's attempt at trying to keep up, stay sane and not lose their friend as well.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

roruna — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 03:20:49 +0530

my nano idea actually came from reading Miss Mapp by E.F. Benson. It's sorta a sitcom in book form written in the 1920s and all about this one woman's manipulations of her friends and neighbors and while reading it, this little almost demonic voice started raving about how evil and wonderful Miss Mapp was. So I thought it'd be funny to mix that jazz age comedy of errors setting with a supernatural plot involving demons. It turned out a lot less funny than I meant for it though. =/

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

-valkyrie- — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:25:53 +0530

It is interesting how many people get their ideas from their dreams. I never get ideas from my dreams. My dreams are usually about things I can't use in my novels. I don't know where I got my idea for last NaNo from, it just popped up in my mind.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Marie.94 — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:20:33 +0530

My whole entire story started with two things: 1. First and foremost, a dream. 2. Upon telling my dream to my friend, she told me I should make it into a story, but to make it more interesting, my character had to shoot the store clerk. From there the bulk of my plot formed during numerous walks around my neighborhood, a 6 hour car ride from Tennessee back to Ohio, and church services (because of course, inspiration would always hit me while I was supposed to be paying attention to sermons). When I look back on it, it's kind of cool to see how it all came together. For instance, my dream originally took place in a labyrinth of a building that was filled with portals that made it even more confusing. I decided I didn't want to do something with portals, but still wanted a really confusing building, so I thought I could make the walls move instead. To do this, my main character ended up being telekinetic the rest of my plot pretty much formed around them being telekinetic and my main character starting out imprisoned. The funny part is, the crazy labyrinth building ended up being just a normal building with a few more hallways than average.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

WiresInABox — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:07:56 +0530

I wanted to write my own versions of fairy tales (very original, I know xD) and I planned to make short stories but that were connected. The same setting, the same group of people but different main characters each time. But then I started to weave them all together and I came up with a real novel-idea. So I made all my stories one, and it worked surprisingly well.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Meli's Abstract Tree Theory — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 07:01:33 +0530

At that last sentence my jaw practically dropped in jealousy, and I took out an invisible spork to poke the computer screen with. I wish my characters could show up fully developed. I have so much trouble trying to figure out their personalities. *Sigh* Oh well. As for my story idea, it came from a weird gate thing in front of an alley in the town where I take trumpet lessons.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

TheEvilMatriarch — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:43:33 +0530

It was a long time ago. I was playing with some characters, and then I realized that I had warped them so much that they were completely different people than they were. And so, I had to find a story for them.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

CalicoRain — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:42:43 +0530

My idea for NaNo 2011 came from a scene I had in my mind when I woke up one morning. I just went from there, thinking about what would have happened before and after. I've had the for this year's NaNo since Week-2 of last year's NaNo. It came from a random comment I made that inspired my brother. The two of us and my husband started joking around, and then I had a plot. ^.^

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

premiumcider — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:07:52 +0530

Years of writing fanfiction and wanting to move on to original fiction but needing something I was used to writing to ease the transition. Well, the novel was crap but I wrote it and my next one will be better yay positive thinking!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Risa Koroka — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:54:25 +0530

Clouds. I was in the car, and a storm was coming. The clouds were all dark and ominous, etcetera, and I thought, "This would be a perfect opening scene for an adventure novel or a fantasy novel. Like, a hunter out killing some kind of monster...something that shouldn't exist...maybe it could be called a Nightcrawler or something...that sounds cool..." When I got home, I wrote the idea on a notepad so I wouldn't forget. Hence, my NaNoWriMo novel. Which is still far from finished...

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Risa Koroka — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:55:10 +0530

I have a weird train of thought...

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

katie_9918 — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:06:37 +0530

I just got a story idea from something I witnessed in my neighborhood on Thursday.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

PotatoPasta — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:54:07 +0530

My idea formed from an inside joke between my best friends and I. We were just joking around, so I decided to write a story based on this joke and it soon branched into one big story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Stratadrake — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:53:47 +0530

During 2008, my entire Nano was originally based around a single-scene challenge I thought up: Character A gets transformed into an animal, but this is deliberately kept secret from the reader until it has to be explicitly pointed out to the character. Which turned out to be a good scene, though the rest of the story surrounding it was a bit dull. My 2007 Nano (to which I wrote a sequel this last 2011) is a much more interesting story, and combines two or more inspirations into one. First, at one point I was playing Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on the GameCube and was rather fascinated by the race of (enemy) symbiotes known as the Ing, who are from the Dark Side of the local planet's twin dimensions. Ing can dissolve their bodies into a liquid state, and when they make trips to the Light Side of the planet they seek out and hijack a local creature, monster, (Space Pirate, Metroid, etc.) and mutate it into a more-powerful dark form. At some point I wondered what it would be like to pit "good" Ing against "evil" Ing in the same setting -- suitable enough material for a standard fanfic, I guess, but when I signed up for Nano in 2007, I ditched any fanfic trappings right after the opening lines of the novel -- I named my MC "Skree", declared the symbiotic fusion to be a permanent, one-time event, and created a completely new setting out of whole cloth. I also realized that in just about every work they appear in, symbiotes are invariably on the "evil" side of the spectrum. Largely because you never get a story told from their POV, symbiote stories are always told from the "human" (or closest surrogate) perspective. Here, the story really is told from the symbiotes' viewpoint; the process of fusing themselves to a host body is in fact the only way their species can even reproduce, and they will ultimately die if they can't undergo the process. Yes, there are still evil symbiotes out there -- they're called the Depraved, but those are the same inherent species, just a different clan/breed.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

MurillionBlue — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:13:52 +0530

My story idea came from a random phrase (Attack of the Sneezing Snuggleporgs), a character mentioned in a short story (the Man Without A Face), the Narrator being punished for attacking Ash Ketchum in a previos story or two, and the idea of a princess *not* being rescued. And then I added bright green ninja cows, two more characters, and a setting backstory (well, I decided that a previous story would be a prequel of sorts for the setting). And that all led to the Reader's bed being thrown out the window about halfway through the story. At least there were no severed heads replacing a bouquet of flowers this time (which has inspired another of my stories). Although the phrase 'paralellepipeds are purple' did appear (which featured in a weird dream I'm slowly turning into a story).

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

jadedelephant65 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:03:24 +0530

my sister and boyfriend inspired me. i had another story all lined up and i was happy with it and i loved it, and then i found out my sister is getting engaged, and my boyfriend suggested i write about a wedding. my novel did a 180 and suddenly i had something completely different. but i loved it

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

fumbleweeds — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:16:08 +0530

Mine came in two parts. First, I read a poem with a line about having a secret, about being able to make it snow. Right then I wanted to write a melancholy love story where the love interest has power to make it snow. So I knew I wanted it to have a supernatural element and take place in wintertime. Some weeks later, I was walking outside, stepping into other people's footprints as I walked. And I was just hit with a wave of inspiration: what if we leave something of ourselves behind in those footprints? So that evolved the story into a psychic winter love story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

lionhuntermo — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 09:44:14 +0530

I was bored out of my skull, and asked my friend for something random to write about. She said "Experiment. New creature- can travel to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Simply by blinking. A weird way to keep exp alive" and the idea morphed from there. ^^

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Alice Rocker — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 19:57:45 +0530

I blended about three plot bunnies together, added some random stuff in and *poof* NaNoNovel.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Cheesypriestess — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 04:46:05 +0530

My MC from 2011 was originally my first Warriors roleplay character, Cinnamonstreak. And then I liked her so much that I decided to write a real (non-warriors) story about her and the whole thing just sort of grew from there. But it's gotten much better since the original idea. I still feel like writing a fanfic about her...but I have my story now. I have lots of stories set in this world of cats, actually. Most of them about the rulers of various kingdoms. Sort of like a set of companion books...only none of them are finished.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Cheesypriestess — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 04:50:54 +0530

That sounds incredibly awesome. Very ominous. It makes me want to read your story.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

A.P. Navis — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:55:25 +0530

My NaNo idea, all of my story ideas actually, come from other stories (tv/movies/books). My brain just latches on to an element here or there and then I tweak it and elaborate on it, sometimes I mix elements from multiple shows/movies together and voila..it's a story!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Sunerun — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:21:55 +0530

Nano 2010: I just had this random but recurrent image of a girl holding a lantern in a flooded library. I asked myself why she would be in that situation and what would happen next and expanded on it! Script frenzy (rebel- doing a novel) 2012: I was thinking about the game hide and seek and wondered- what if it were more serious than that? Why would someone be looking for/hunting children?

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Chai Maya — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 03:44:51 +0530

I almost always get mine from dreams. If it isn't from a dream, it usually isn't that good - with the exception of my current project, which is by FAR the longest (this one is 49k and counting, my second longest story is about 6500 words). Weird how that works out ... This one came from learning about anthropomorphic monsters like vampires and rhythmic syncopation in music.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Zookeeper — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:33:40 +0530

Usually, my story ideas come when I'm in an altered state of consciousness. No, nothing illegal or hippie, but when I'm in almost a trance state like deep daydreaming, or when I'm doing something fairly mindless like raking leaves or showering. My body's engaged in doing something, but my mind is free to wander. And sometimes it happens when I'm in an almost dream state, like that state you get when you're just on the verge of dropping off to sleep. That's where my last idea came from. It was aggravating because all I got was two characters and a seemingly nonsense scenario. Later the next day, when my mind was on idle I got most of the rest of the story. The skeleton, anyway. It will still need a lot of work this November and beyond.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Geesafaire — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 03:17:49 +0530

The basic idea was inspired by a conversation found on Overheard at the Office. Two coworkers were discussing how slow the day seemed to be going, and a third says (and I'm sort of paraphrasing) "Not for me; I discovered time travel." My story gone is now a massive multiverse with spinoff and a sequel, and while that conversation no longer appears in the book, the idea is still there.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

writergirl31 — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:13:57 +0530

The novel I'm working on right now was inspired by a short story I wrote a few years ago. It was about a girl who gets trapped in a blizzard and is rescued by a killer. I decided to expand on the idea, and that's how my book was 'born' ;) My novel has very little in common with the original short story, though.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Featherpirate — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 04:34:39 +0530

Uhhh let's see... July Camp 11 I had a vague group of five characters inspired by the dungeon groups in World of Warcraft & Wolf's Rain that were idling about. Since I started Camp ten days into the month I just snatched them up and forced them into a world. It seemed to work xD Nano 11 I had the world, something I'd been working on for a month or so. Having created this world to play in I just grabbed some random characters from assorted races and wrote. I found myself rather unpleased by this approach, since I had been so absorbed in making the world that writing only a fraction about it was highly unsatisfying. However it does give me somewhere to play if I get bored.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Lacey Fay — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 01:07:32 +0530

My NaNo Novel? Well let's see, it's a bit of a story actually. See, I've always loved superhumans, but I didn't want to do a rip off of the X-Men, so I didn't want to do a school thing, even though I wanted to do a school thing. Make sense? Anyway, I was watching Leverage one day when the idea hit, "Wait, what if they were a superhuman spy organization?" And so the idea of the Agency, and it's training school, the Academy, was born. The two main characters, Nicholai and Natasha, (Nicky and Toni in the book), where actually the MCs for book one and two, and Toni was for book three. There were.... 5 or 6 books originally, actually. Then, I started thinking about how Nicky ended up in Foster Care, how his mother had died. And then I started thinking about how they were both from the same city, and so that turned me to the idea of their parents, or rather, their mothers. My mind spun for... three days, I think, before it came to the conclusion that both mothers were from the city, and that they had known each other. Hence, Fearless was born. My current novel takes place in the same world. The idea for it came from the thought of the reaction to superhumans, the fact that not all of them would be uber powerful, and my hatred of the werewolf phenomenon and the want to make a creature like the traditional werewolf, but more dangerous. Hence, Whispers of a Setting Sun was born.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Lacey Fay — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 01:10:35 +0530

I wish to read these books. A lot.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Arya Svit-Kona — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:20:55 +0530

Well.... are you talking about my original idea or where what it finally became came from? The original idea came to me when I was writing a descriptive essay for school and I had to describe a setting. I chose a moonlit castle, but.... it turned into a short story that my main character butted into. What it actually became came to me in the car going home a couple weeks before NaNo began. I was attempting to figure out how to deal with my MC's amnesia when my story completely morphed into what it is now. It's actually completely unrecognizable.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

ceg045 — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 04:09:11 +0530

The novel I'm developing right now has a strong "people are not who they seem" theme, drawing on Pride and Prejudice and The Scarlet Pimpernel in particular. I'm also looking at scandals at Penn State and, to a lesser extent, in the Catholic Church, exploring how certain figures and institutions (in my case, beloved sports franchises) have acquired a "can do no wrong" reputation, leading to truly horrific stuff going on behind closed doors.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

ElliMelody — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 05:58:38 +0530

My current idea came from a song I heard. I really liked the song. Its called Fires at Midnight by Blackmore's Night. somehow the whole Fires at Midnight idea inspired a novel about a teen girl who burns her village down one night trying to get away from her adopted father who set a spell on people like her, people with special "powers/abilities". I mean, i can see where the setting her village on fire part came from...but the rest, out of nowhere. Another idea came from a title I actually found on the adoption forums here. I saw it and told myself I had to find a spot for it. So, it inspired a trilogy about werewolves/werecats/werefoxes, with each book from a different werecreature's viewpoint(book 1 is Meow from a werecat, book 2 yip from a werefox, and book 3 howl from a werewolf.)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Webgoji — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 23:00:47 +0530

My current idea came because I had to slaughter my last plot bunny. Don't worry, it already has a GAPING hole in it. I just put it out of it's misery. See, I liked the idea of the slaughterhouse for processing people, but my last plot concept had a nasty plot CHASM that made me have to rethink the idea. I was reading some Lovecraft and checking out some ideas when my new plot bunny was born! Bad plot bunny + HP Lovecraft + Atlantis = New Plot! Everyone wonders if Atlantis was real. Turns out it was! They were highly developed and working on new technologies for hiding their ships when the entire continent was thrown into another dimension. Now it has returned, but with new citizens, citizens that begin enslaving humanity for food and to build their cities. Jerry is captured and forced to work in a human slaughterhouse when his captors send him to Atlantis to deliver meat for food and bones for building when he discovers military special forces stowed away to attack the Atlanteans. Does he aid them and risk his own life or give them away to save his skin? We shall see . . .

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

skymessenger — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:30:52 +0530

A dream that kinda shaped itself over a period of time.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Webgoji — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:18:57 +0530

No! Wait! (See, this is how my plot bunnies take shape.) Atlantis . . . meh. I'm gonna put the slaughterhouse on the back burner, let that plot bunny fatten up a little. Instead . . . They don't come from "another dimension", but are creatures that exist in the subtle existence of dreams. Jerry is a clinical psychiatrist and studies how the mind functions when he gets embroiled in a company extracting those creatures through people's dreams.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Webgoji — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 22:47:36 +0530

But wait! There's more! So my friend said it would be really demonic and said the monster that Jerry talks with should be named "minion . . . because we are many". I responded that he had his Biblical quote wrong and that it was, "I am Legion for we are many," and that I couldn't use Legion because Legion is referenced in my manuscript "The Seraphim Protocol" which I'm trying to get published and . . . LIGHTBULB! This will actually be a prequel to "The Seraphim Protocol" and will explain the world of Charon! OMG, writergasm! (Can I say that?)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Gilly Bean — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 04:39:57 +0530

The idea was actually originally a fanfiction. However, when NaNo rolled around and I had no ideas, I adapted it with my own characters. I realized the plot was actually much better that way, and my novel was born.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

MutantCanuck — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:00:26 +0530

I got the basic inspiration from the Hunger Games. My story however has morphed into a way different thing in general. Though it won't be hard to tell I'm a fan. >.<

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Celticsmc12 — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 18:54:29 +0530

Mine sprouted from a thread. People were critiquing first lines. And I got a first few lines. I wrote it down,and the story started from there.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Catwoman1138 — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:37:24 +0530

I remember exactly. I was looking through the adopt-a-plot thread, and one was about a battle of the bands. One sentence was like "If they win, they get ___________. But if they lose..." and immediately my mind was like "They die!" Which wasn't actually how the sentence ended (slightly worrying implications there), but from that I got the idea for a reality competition where you die if you're eliminated.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Cameron Paul Wiggin — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 05:26:23 +0530

I guess mine started to come to life as I played with my brother and his Legos. We were building towns and people, and coming up with rediculous cultures they lived in. But after a few days of that we stopped; however, the creativeness was still stuck in my head. And without the Lego cities to bar my creative potential, my story setting started to come to life. It was the most childish way (in my opinion) to get an idea.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

memoriesofwinter — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 06:39:12 +0530

I was writing a completely different story with a completely different plot. I was about 10k in, and I realized that I was slowing down, so I started to write a section of the story on a different document. Then I went back and reread it and then it dawned on me! I should make this a whole different story! And I did. And here I am. Originally, I was going to work in the main idea of the first story into it, but I decided to just leave it out completely. The idea from the first story came from a mash-up of different books that I happened to be reading at the time.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

GoneLookingForMyself — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:19:55 +0530

The Storm One started out as a light paranormal romance called Drop Dead Gorgeous, which I came up with without thinking much. Then my FMC's guardian announced his true personality and things careered on from there with the characters basically telling me things, and it's still taking shape. Mardaway was a generic idea that I built off the idea of somebody discovering the prophecy they've been following for most of the book was false. Then I realized I was bored with the Marda, an upright honorable Jedi-like group, and I changed them to these shadowy almost ninja or VFD types. Then I realized it would be perfect to lift the plot of one of my fanfictions into, and I did that. :D There's not much of the original idea left. Nega was born from a crack pairing I adore and the song Dare You To Move by Switchfoot. It's going to be saaaaad... :( So, my ideas are born from a wide range of things.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

selinedun9 — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 20:56:59 +0530

I think I multi-tasked from a Crusades class and an Ethics class I was taking last semester. I thought: "What is the difference between murder and killing (and the appropriate ways of handling the trials) [courtesy of my Ethics class]," and then I knew I had to do something historical fiction....having been secretly rooting for the Muslims the entire way through the Crusades....put two and two together: took tons of notes in the class and the plot developed. It was really helpful; I enjoyed learning about my classes because I needed the information for my novel, and by doing so, found that I really really liked the classes. yay. :)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

A.L. More — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:13:55 +0530

The story idea I used for NaNo 2011 actually came from a call for submissions on a publisher's blog. It didn't really pan out, but it was a fun story to write. I might rework it in a year or two. We'll see. The story I'm going to do for Camp came to me when I realized I wanted to write for kids. I started wracking my brain to find something I'd love to write, and I settled on dragons. First story in this arc is going to be a one-off with series potential.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

JetteMuts — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 05:48:20 +0530

The story idea used for NaNo 2011 and all other stories I wrote came from a single dream. I told my friend about that dream and she told me to write it down. We talked a lot about it and so the dream became several loose chapters. The only thing left for me to do was connecting those chapters and tadaa, story unfold :) Now, I keep getting inspired by reading and listening music, but the concept of that world, the stories, are still from that dream 7 years ago :)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

42n8 Me — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:23:33 +0530

My story also came from a dream. Sometimes I joke to friends that I'm not writing my own novel - I'm channeling it. Many aspects of the story have come from subsequent dreams. In the early writing, I would awaken in the night with flashes of a scene or a plot twist in my head. I still keep a notebook on my night table, to jot these down. It's crazy. I never cared much for distopian settings or science fantasy; but this is what I now find myself writing. I've said that I will use a pen name for this novel, because there is a C-list celeb with my name; but, to be honest, I find it a little scary to even think of being identified with such a wildly 'fantastic' work (and with the sometimes sexually explicit parts of it - which I also did not set out to do). What keeps me at it is: I love the story. I also love the characters...even the not-so-nice ones. The quality of my days, now, is determined by the amount of work I get done on this piece. Writing this story is something I'm meant to do.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

biki576 — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:10:04 +0530

From the title. I got "Facial Biography" off of the adoption thread, and I immediately started thinking about how awesome it would be if... And then nano happened.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

thrilleraddict — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:19:14 +0530

Allah's Servant came from the niqab bans in France. The Message ( lame working title ) umm.....not sure, was just writing down random story ideas in my notebook ome day, I think.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Cheesypriestess — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:27:56 +0530

*gasp* I love the Scarlet Pimpernel! And the scene in the book, in the garden, and it's all so aww, poor Percy. Did that make sense?

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

kwongo — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:30:16 +0530

Well, I got mine from Minecraft. Guess what my novel is about? Kekeke...

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Amaranthinium — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 03:12:10 +0530

Story One came about from a Target in the middle of no where in Alabama. I was in the candy row and I saw a rather effeminate man and a girl dressed in punkish/skater clothes, both pretty young and really angry-looking, together with a screaming baby. I guess they were probably just a young couple or something else not out of the ordinary like that, but I was bored so I started to think what if they weren't, then why were they there together with that kid? The whole idea evolved from there, though it's become so radically different by now that even I can hardly believe that's where it came from. Story Two came from my visits to St. Augustine in Florida, which I wanted to write a story about because historically, it's interesting, and presently, so hilariously touristy. It combined with another idea I had about someone trying to destroy love, which came from some TV (")science(" ?) documentary about how, by a kind of twisted and TV-worthy logic that could be true but is probably not (but is interesting nonetheless), love is a virus.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Feena — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 18:36:35 +0530

I went to visit someone in hospital, then I was suddenly hit by the idea for a book about it when I was out walking my dog a few days later.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

larelmian — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 03:16:05 +0530

Current work-in-progress . . . well, it never came from one place. I'd always liked fantasy, and I wanted to try an epic, like "Lord of the Rings" or "The Sword of Shannara." Actually, a lot of influence came from Shannara -- particularly the style of battle scenes. And there's one major story arc that came about because I didn't like how a story arc in that book ended, so I determined to do it differently. The Black Serpent Guard (a league of assassins) was inspired by Gadianton in the Book of Mormon. *nod nod* I threw in a crew of pirates to fill in a plot hole. I tried writing the pirate captain's story during one NaNo, but I didn't like it much and ended up killing everyone. The back story has undergone drastic revisions since then. The idea for the whole basic plot came about as I was working on my fantasy world and decided magic was hereditary. Then I wondered where the magic really began. Elves, of course. But why didn't any of my stories have elves in them? What had happened to the elves? Well . . . it began on a dark and stormy night.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Chillibean — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:24:33 +0530

Let's see... The Lying Division... My first idea for a long time was that my MC was a magician, who befriends a princess, their kingdom gets sacked, they move to another kingdom only to realise one of the princess's guards was a spy... It was quite convoluted and complicated. Then I had a desire to write an epic high fantasy, 3-way battle. I scrapped the moving-to-another-kingdom idea. Instead, MC became a young sorcerer, who is framed for being a spy. The actual spy is the Spy in the previously mentioned version, who is now the king's advisor. The Advisor blackmails MC to become a spy, while promising to clear his name and saying he's not a spy if he works for them. It's so very complicated :) But I didn't know where to go after that. Then I wondered: How awesome would it be to have professional liars? Tada! That got rid of all my magic very quickly. MC is now a thief-turned-Liar. The Spy/Advisor has become my mentor/Liar-turned-antagonist-turned-king-turned-protagonist. The Princess has a ridiculously small role in it... And that's how I like it :)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

frenziedmythology — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:08:43 +0530

I get a lot of inspiration from reading and listening to music. Falling Up, especcially :)

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

RoboPhantom — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:03:30 +0530

I'm.... actually not sure. I know I first came up with my NaNo idea years ago and even left it on the Adopt-a-Plot the year I came up with it, but for the life of me I can't think of what caused me to think of it in the first place, or even why I decided to try working with it again. I think I picked it up because I wanted to work with the character who became the protagonist, but I have no idea where he came from, either. -frets-

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

allwritemel — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:58:54 +0530

The second novel I'm working on came up and hit me on the nose! I was bored, lonely, sad and felt like i only had one thing to look forward to ... my friend coming down that night. Then from nowhere I "saw" a character walking next to me (I'm not mad! I knew she was a character) and she told me her name was Shannon or Sharon ... may go for Shannon ... and she was dressed completely differently to how I normally dress my characters (the name was different to the usual type I use as well ... I generally give my characters names like Tracey, Elizabeth, Suzy, Jane - you know the type). She insisted on telling me her full life story - seemingly from the minute seh was born. I'm sure all of this will be useful but, typically, I didn't have a journal with me to write the story. So while I was pretending to read I was actually listening to the story she was telling me. It was weird but I'm writing it down now and hoping to write it for Camp NaNo - trouble is I'm working on 3 or 4 books at the same time!

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

IrisFlower — Wed, 09 May 2012 02:26:46 +0530

I got my story idea from a side character in what I lovingly refer to as 'head canon' who had recently discovered a dark and troubling secret about her own health. I ended up turning the side character into the protagonist of her own story, added a few new characters and extra subplots, and bam! New story idea right there.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Earthsick — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:43:47 +0530

Recently most idea come to me when I'm about to fall asleep. Then, it's mostly just one lonely sentence that pops into my head. I already got up a couple of times to write it down before going back to bed and actually sleep. From those single sentences I developed so far: my plot for Nano 11 (which worked out neat), an improvement to the plot for CampNano in August and a random plot idea that I'm not sure if I'm going to use it (but it sounds promising enough.) My idea for CampNano in August was inspired quite a lot by Shutter Island, but uses a different setting and a different genre (as far as I know). So, the circumstances are different but the way of how to pull it off is from Shutter Island. Let's see about that one though, I still need a lot of characters and stuff.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Buffy871 — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:55:19 +0530

I have a recurring dream about Pyramid Head where he's not evil. He's just misunderstood.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

Generalist — Thu, 17 May 2012 02:10:50 +0530

It depends upon the story. Some have been things my wife and I have talked about for years. Others started as titles I've come up with that have been expanded into stories. Then there is the current set. I've been trying to create a whole set of Phase Outlines for a set of short stories. I determine a genre and subgenre, figure out a character name and determine the environment they are in and the problem or problems they are facing. If I'm being lazy, I reuse the genre/subgenre, environment and character and create a prequel/sequel.

Re: Looking back, where did you get your story idea?

MutantCanuck — Thu, 17 May 2012 02:15:23 +0530

My idea is an idea that has been in my head since I read 'The Girl who Owned a City' in elementary school. Mine's a twist on the idea and it's been twisting ever since. XD