finding story ideas

It can be difficult to find ideas for a story when you’re involved in creative writing but here are a few tried-and-tested ways of finding them.

News stories  can provide ideas for stories, especially if they are human interest stories. The best places to hunt for these are the tabloid newspaper web sites. Visit them and look out for any articles about love and marriage, or bizarre events.
Don’t restrict yourself to any particular country. If you’re in the US take a look at the British, Canadian and Australian tabloids as well as the American tabloids. British, Canadian and Australian experiences are often similar to  American experiences due to cultural similarities. Because of this, it’s pretty easy to adapt any story ideas that you might find in these countries to American conditions.

The idea for my short story `smoking story‘ came from an article that was published on an overseas news web site. The article was about the fact that some British men and women were finding romance after meeting in `smoking shelters’. These are small cabins which have been erected outside many British bars and pubs to comply with Britain’s anti-smoking laws.
I got the idea for my story Bye webcam girl by chance. I was surfing a search engine optimization (SEO) web site when I noticed an ad. for an adult web site. The guy who was selling the site mentioned in his post that some of his visitors were spending $300 a day on viewing adult webcams.
There are several ways of saving your story ideas on your computer. One way is to save the page that contains the story by hovering your mouse over`file’ in the top left hand side of your computer screen and clicking `save as’. Another way is to save it as a screen shot. Click on `print screen’ on your keyboard, open a paint program and click on paste. The story will now be saved as a screenshot.