Creative Strategies

Push a button, get a random idea:

Seeds are simple seeds for stories, or ways to come up with writing prompts. Restrictions are ideas to constrain your creative writing process and challenge yourself. Revision contains ideas for revising existing pieces of writing. Songs are ways to generate improvised lyrical topics, which are mostly my pretty-strange tactics and may or may not work as jumping-off points for you.

IDEA TITLE

scroll down for sources

Modifying the ideas

You can download this file and edit the ideas object to add or remove these categories, or any new idea seeds you want for yourself. Just save this page as HTML, edit it in a text editor (like Notepad) — I promise it's not that scary — and then drag it onto a browser window.

Or, if you like, you can send along your ideas to add and I'll put them in. Whee!

Future features

Put hash in URL with pushState() so ideas or lists are bookmarkable and/or copy-pasteable
Difficulty rankings and selection — some of these are way harder than others. For now, just PUSH BUTAN more.
A set of "unsticking" ideas, more like oblique strategies, when you are partway through something but need a random push.

Sources:

As noted on specific entries, but especially:

Ursula K. Le Guin - Steering the Craft
Plant the Seed workshop organized by Franciszka Voeltz and Jennifer Morales
Various friends over the years, most of whose names start with J for some reason: Jeff, Jenifer, John, DB, Jason, Rebecca... thanks folks.

Maintainer: