Enter the inspiration zone to generate story ideas

Tanya Lloyd Kyi has a prescription for filling blank pages: Freewrite with childlike abandon. Kyi shared tips about writing and generating ideas in her workshop, “The Inspiration Zone: Practical ways to generate and sustain ideas,” at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference Oct. 19-21.

Kyi said that, as a child, she wrote constantly and didn’t worry about who saw it. But things change when you get older.

“We can find ourselves in a straitjacket worrying about what we’re allowed to write about and not write about,” she said. “Sometimes we have to cast away those doubts and just write.”

Writing prompts can spark ideas for new stories.

Kyi recommends Grab Bag Writing Prompts. Here’s how it works: You decide how many words you want in your “grab bag,” and the computer generates a writing prompt using randomly selected words and/or phrases from its list. Use that random word list as a starting point and write a story, essay, or poem that uses all the words.

Freewriting combined with our writer’s instinct and observations can be powerful medicine for generating new ideas for stories and poems.

Learn more about Tanya Lloyd Kyi at her website.