Greetings from the edge,
Every writer eventually gets asked the same question. Not the one about when you’re going to pay the bill, sir, but the other one: where do your ideas come from?
There’s a well-worn trope about “the muse.” Stephen King famously describes his as a gruff, middle-aged man who smokes, drinks bourbon, and is more likely to hurl abuse than whisper inspiration.
Mine? A bookish, slightly terrifying “sexy librarian” who occasionally spells out a good idea for my dumb arse, but mostly just taps her foot and reminds me that if I’ve got time for video games, I’ve got time to write.
But the truth is far less romantic. Ideas come from everywhere. A throwaway line on the news. A misheard phrase. A piece of art that quietly demands a story.
The real problem isn’t finding ideas. It’s knowing which ones are worth your time.
This is the checklist I use to figure out whether an idea has legs… or whether it needs to be quietly wheeled off to a Swiss clinic and humanely put to rest.
Does It Have a Hook?
Can you sum up your idea in a single sentence that makes someone lean in, or stop what they’re doing and say, “What?!”
Take my story, The Bone Garden (currently out in the wild, trying to impress a magazine editor somewhere):
“A cemetery where bones grow into whispering plants.”
That’s a hook. Clean, strange, and doing a lot of work in very few words. It tells you what the story is, and more importantly, it makes you want to know what the hell is going on.
Now compare that to:
“A story about a guy who learns stuff about himself.”
That’s not a hook. That’s beige wallpaper. That’s the literary equivalent of a shrug.
If you can make the person you’re pitching to physically lean in, or say those golden words, “tell me more,” then congratulations, you’ve got something worth chasing.
If not… it might already be dead on arrival.
Is There Tension Built In?
Show me the money… no, wait. Show me the friction.
Every story, every good story, runs on it. Something has to be pushing against something else. Without that pressure, nothing moves.
In Moby-Dick, it’s man versus nature. One obsessive captain, one enormous white whale, and a collision course that can only end badly.
In Fight Club, the narrator takes on society, identity, and the hollow theatre of modern masculinity… and, in a way I’m definitely not allowed to talk about, himself.
That’s tension. That’s fuel.
Here are a few classic fault lines you can build on:
- Person vs person
- Person vs self
- Person vs nature
- Person vs society
- Person vs past
- Person vs something deeply unnatural
You don’t need explosions. You need pressure.
If nothing is pushing, pulling, or threatening to snap for 5,000 words, you haven’t written a story. You’ve arranged some very polite sentences in a row and hoped for the best.
Stories need resistance. Without it, they just… sit there.
Do You Care… Even a Little?
This is the point where you need to be brutally honest with yourself:
Do you actually care about this idea?
Not in a dreamy, this will change literature forever kind of way. Just enough to sit down, day after day, and do the work.
If the idea already feels like homework at the starting line, it’s going to feel like a root canal by the time you reach “The End.”
Now, interest isn’t the same as passion. Not every writer is in love with everything they produce. Sometimes, writing is just that… work. Even Stephen King has talked about treating it like a job rather than waiting for lightning to strike.
But there still needs to be something there. A flicker. A question. A quiet itch you want to scratch.
You don’t have to adore the idea. You just have to care enough to carry it over the finish line.
If you don’t… it won’t get there.
Can It Surprise You?
When I sat down to write Emergency Call 2154, I had no idea I was going to kill off Jonah.
I liked Jonah. He had plans. Potential. Probably a decent future.
Instead, I crushed him to death in an airlock.
That moment didn’t come from an outline. It came from the story deciding it had other ideas.
And that’s the point.
If you already know exactly how your story begins, unfolds, and ends… tread carefully. You might be writing something competent, but you’re probably not writing something alive.
Good ideas tend to have a bit of fog to them. You can see the shape, maybe even the destination, but the road there twists. It resists. It surprises you.
You can plan, and you probably should, but leave space for the story to argue back. For characters to make bad decisions. For things to go wrong in ways you didn’t schedule.
I’m naturally a pantser, trying very hard to behave like a responsible adult and plan things out. But even then, if the story suddenly yanks the wheel and takes a hard left… I listen.
Because if it can surprise you, there’s a good chance it’ll surprise your reader too.
Can You See One Great Scene?
At the planning stage, is there a moment you can see?
Not the whole story in vivid technicolour, just one scene playing out in your head like a film trailer you didn’t mean to watch twice.
- A confrontation
- A reveal
- A line of dialogue that lands like a brick
If you can see one scene clearly, you’ve got a foothold.
And footholds matter. That’s where you start. You climb from there, hand over hand, until suddenly you’re not planning anymore… you’re writing.
No scene? No spark? Then you might not have a story yet. You’ve got a concept waiting for oxygen.
The Verdict System (Simple, Satisfying)
Now run the numbers:
0 Yeses → Dead on arrival. Bury it with honours and move on.
5 Yeses → What are you still doing here? Go write it.
3–4 Yeses → Worth exploring. Workshop it. Kick it around until it sharpens.
1–2 Yeses → Back in the drawer. It’s not dead, just not ready.
See you in the margins,
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