: Re: What is the best way to generate ideas? I want to write a novel, but I want to write that novel using my best idea currently... it's just that, I don't have an idea, at least not one that

@LarsenBagley300

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Well, as a writer, your first and harshest critic is going to be yourself, and you seem to be doing a good job. So the first thing you need to do is take your ideas and say they are worthy of a story... They just might not click as a story. I would then list all the main and supporting cast that would play a big impact in your story and also figure out what the story's end result will be. This gets you a decent beginning and the ending goal that your middle will need to fill in the gaps (this works well with my style, where I write large, serialized chapters, rather than one story per book... but I got into writing from the tv shows I was watching and the move to serialization over episodic shows was happening right as I was bitten by the writing bug... it also works to overcome a flaw in my genre that a one novel one story format wouldn't.).

I would also above all else, nail down your antagonist(s) first. Heroes are a dime a dozen and their job is simple: they rise to meet the challenges of the narrative... but a Villain... that's the personification of the hero's challenges. Harry Potter would be a bratty kid if it wasn't for Voldemort... Luke Skywalker was a whiny farm without Vader (hell, Luke had dialog about wanting to join the Imperial Military if only Uncle Owen would let him get off the farm).

Keep something by your bed to write down dreams... Some of my most persistent ideas have come from my nightmares (one is so good, it's formed a central pillar to my theme for the overall universe) and you can often forget the details of dreams if you go about your day. And always be open to recycling. That nightmare thing has survived several treatments and story ideas. It has now found a home and is stuck to one book. I've had characters who still persist and make planned appearances for various stories with little thought from his original design and is probably existed in my head for about half my lifetime, if not longer.

Also make sure you have the hard rules of your story in place (especially if the work is speculative to some degree... scifi or fantasy) you need to know what your characters can and cannot do within the fictional setting. Even if it boils down to mundane things like "So and So will always choose family over the law..." These help set the boundaries and allow you to bend the rules without breaking them.

And now here's where I will probably rub a lot of people the wrong way... I think the most harmful advise to give to a new writer is "Write What you know." This puts people in a limited bind where they will rely on genre conventions and stereotyped characters (or characters who are more out of touch culturally)... Rather, I'd suggest write what you don't know... but write it like you know it (i.e. WE MUST DO RESEARCH). This doesn't mean don't look at other works in your genre, but look for ways to do them differently. Also, especially when researching cultures, it can lead to some insight into possible stories... mythology is a great well spring for motifs and themes and someone of the more obscure mythologies might actually line up nicely with your story and maybe could help you add to your work.

Unless critical to the plot, I would let your dialog come out while writing the drafts of your book. I find it helps get into the moment better and makes the character's words more in step with the plot. Similar for action sequences, which will rely on an environment but might not be overall important to the plot with respect to that environment.

Your story genre will inform a lot of what tropes or cliches you're going to use. There are certain things that are inherit to a genre (for example, Space Operas must have some kind of faster than light technology... fantasies must have an understanding of what magic can do in the universe...). These are not necessarily bad, but there has to be some way to distinguish yourself from other works in the genre (Vampire fiction is wonderful for this... It's a trope of the genre that at some point, some character will pull a traditional vampire fighting impliment (garlic, crosses, ect) only for the vampire to laugh and tell them that "real" vampires don't work like they do in the current pop-vampire fad work... Twilight is the popular one now... before that, it was Interview with a Vampire...).

As for a resource, and not knowing what genres you are interested in, I recommend TVTropes.org, which has a very detailed wiki devoted to tropes in various genres across various mediums and how those tropes are used. They also have a series of articles that are "So you want to write an X" where X is a particular genre, which lists classic things to consider, potential plot kernels, and the good, the bad, and the ugly in that genre. There Useful Notes section is also a personal favorite, which are written with several in depth explantory articles on a wide variety of topics that might appear in fiction including an article dedicated to every nation on the earth, almost all modern military services (and a few historical ones such as Ancient Roman, The Confederate States of America, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) that can help you come up with problems that need to be addressed if you want to portray your topics correctly. Quite a few are very very long, but they tend to read better than say Wikipedia because, as tvtropes describes itself they're "buttloads more informal". The article writers tend to be quite cheeky and slip in bits of sarcasm into even the most serious of pieces.

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