‘Ideas rule the world.’ Hence, they are omnipotent. As a writer you frequently come across ideas & deal with them according to your will & pleasure. Ideas brings out a writer from you, enlighten you, making you more resourceful, competent & versatile. Sometimes, as a writer, you feel embarrassed when you are bereft of ideas & struggle to write. When writing is your passion, you cannot remain dormant just because you are lacking in ideas.
As a writer, your brain is the powerhouse as well as the storehouse of ideas, information & knowledge.
When you are a creative writer, ideas emanate from your brain.But your brain needs to be constantly updated & refreshed so as to keep you as a resourceful person. In fact, your natural ability as a writer & your writing skills are honed up by the combination of factors, like your personal experience & the knowledge that you acquire by your voracious reading & from the experience of others.
In the modern times, when people were constantly on the look out for means & ways of salvation from this birth, it was Henry Thoreau who offered a very simple solution ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You!’ Similarly, as a writer if you are constantly on the look out for ideas, it can be said: ‘The source of ideas is within you.’ Having said that it does not mean you are omnipotent & always bubbling with the ideas.
Ideas that emanate from your personal experience:-
Your personal experience as a child, as a teen, as a lover, as a parent, as an aged person, as an employee or employer, as an artist, as an actor or actress, as a politician, as a victim of any kind, as any other professional & even as a criminal or culprit etc are all providing you with a gamut of personal & practical knowledge gained by you in various roles & capacities.
What you have to do as a writer is simply to open the storehouse or treasure trove of your brain & run the time machine backward or forward to recall & search from the invaluable information to look out for ideas for writing available therein.
Ideas gained from the experience of others:-
Apart from the personal experience gained by you, you can moreover have invaluable information from other people from various walks of life, by interacting with them or by interviewing them. The essential prerequisite for gaining knowledge from the experience of others is that you have to keep your eyes & ears wide open & as a writer always on the look out for new ideas & look at things from a different perspective than an ordinary person looking at it. Likewise, when you have a chance to hear the conversation of others, it may contain the seeds of a short story or an article or even a novel. What you require is the application of your mind to the given facts & triggers your creative talent.
Ideas gained from other external sources:-
1) By reading the writings of others:-
As a writer, you should always be a voracious reader. If you are concentrating on any particular genre of writing, say fiction, it is always useful to read the works of other writers so as to obtain inspired, besides learning different styles of writing. You should not only read classics like Shakespeare & his contemporaries yet moreover modern writers, so as to keep yourself abreast of current trends in writing. Similarly, in case of non-fiction writings like essays & articles, you should read others as much as possible that may serve you with new source of information & ideas.
2) By reading News Papers & Magazines, fiction & non-fiction:-
Part of the wide reading process, as a writer, you should moreover read a number of newspapers & magazines so as to update your knowledge on current affairs; even a strange incident or episode may moreover catch your attention & inspire your imagination to write a short story or novel or that may become a source of an article or blog. Reading newspapers & magazines moreover assist a writer to learn the current linguistic trends that prevail in a particular region. Similarly reading the fiction & non-fiction works of other writers provide a tremendous source of inspiration & ideas.
3) By browsing Internet :-
Internet has shrunk the world so small; it facilitates effortless & faster communication to every nook & corner of the world. Irrespective of your status as a writer, whether you are a newbie or a renowned & established writer, internet has become the mainstay of your profession & inspiration. The plethora of information provided by the Internet Public Library, British Library, dictionary.com, reference.com etc, the search engines like Google.com,yahoo.com, webfetch.com,ask.com, the newsgroups like Google groups,http://groups.google.com, alt.journalism, alt.writing, misc.writing, screenplays & writers newsletters like Dan case’s Writing for Dollars, absolute write, Writers Weekly, ezinearticles.com news letter & Pearl Luke’s News Letter are a few samples that serve as source of information & ideas to writers.
Number of Forums in various web sites like Indusladies.com, Helium.com, Triond.com, Boddunan.com, ezinearticles.com, provide superior source of information & inspiration providing ideas for writers.
Exclusive websites meant for writers like Writers Digest.com, Writing.com & Writing World.com etc provide useful writing tips for writers, besides guiding you towards a number of poetry, short story & essay competitions. The monthly magazine published by the Writers Digest is a must for a fulltime writer, to keep you updated approximately the Writers World.
Writing prompts provided by the Writers Digest & Writing Prompts.com etc are tremendous source of ideas & inspiration to the budding writers as well as the established writers.
Various freelancing sites like worldfreelancing.com, elance.com, Getafreelancer.com, & Guru.com provide ideas & freelancing opportunities to writers.
Besides there are a number of article submitting directories like ezinearticles.com, which are quite useful for writers. In particular, the ezinearticles.com is a premiere article directory that classifies writers into three categories like basic, basic+ & platinum on the basis of their writing standard & their eligibility to submit a fixed number of articles. Writers in the platinum category can submit unlimited number of articles. As a writer if you wish to have some ideas for writing, you will not be disappointed when you browse thousands of articles in the site. Apart from that, the site moreover offers some innovative article writing training through on line that further sharpens & inspires a writer.
Sites like Triond.com, which has a number of subsidiary web sites like web upon, quazen, authspot, sports tale, socyberty, health mad etc, accepts & publishes writers articles & post them in the relevant site on the basis of their category. You have moreover an added advantage in the web site. Triond highlights the current trendy topics to its writers besides giving them an opportunity to browse them to have an idea about. It is for the writers to take their own initiatives & to avail the opportunity to have an idea of them & obtain updated. In fact Triond does not impose any restriction in getting yourself updated & writing articles. Another highlight of the site is the Hot Content list that not only helps the best articles that have been published to obtain highlighted yet moreover enables writers to obtain inspired & have ideas for new articles.
Thus there is no dearth of ideas for writers. In fact ideas are galore & they are omnipresent.
Written by rlingam
One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do satisfactory ideas come from? With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You & the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map & The Invention of Air to address an urgent & universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, & encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, & our culture forward. Beginning with Charles Darwin’s first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef & drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities & to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of satisfactory ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, & inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, & traces them across time & disciplines. Most exhilarating is Johnson’s conclusion that with today’s tools & environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants …
originally posted 07/2011
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Filed Under: Ideas Tagged With: Article, IDEAS, writing
