Hello and welcome back to my blog.

Today I am going to talk about how I come up with ideas in my writing.

Yesterday I published a post on 2 Sentence Horror Stories. So to figure out how to come up with this, something that can be scary or creepy look at #17 the one where the shoes kept on walking. So to come up with that idea I took a mundane item and thought about what would be creepy or scary about a pair of shoes. If the shoes kept walking by themselves that would be scary or at the very least creepy.

For coming up with different types of characters for books I got the idea from one of James Scott Bell’s writing craft books. If you want some good writing craft books his along with Marci Kennedy’s Busy Writer series are among the best writing craft books.

From the James Scott Bell book with coming up with different characters take a standard character such as a bar tender or coffee shop waitress. What do you think of when you first write down that character?

For a bartender I thought of a suave dark and handsome man who can easily get a woman home. For a coffee shop waitress I think of the single mom desperately trying to get food on the table for her three kids.

These are both cliched characters so a good exercise – again this is not my idea but from the James Scott Bell books (buy them they’re all awesome) – is to list at least 10 different people and you’ll come up with someone even better.

For the bartender I came up with a midget, dwarf or little person whichever is the acceptable term these days who uses a trampoline and acrobatics to reach the bar glasses and alcohol to serve the customer. This will be in my book No Remorse No Regret.

The coffee shop waitress I came up with the rich girl who was forced to work at a minimum wage job to learn the value of hard work – that it was her parents that are responsible for the place she is in life not anything she did. That might be in a different book at sometime in the future.