A good idea doesn’t guarantee a good book. But without a good idea, you certainly can’t write a good book. If you want to become an author, start by learning how to generate strong ideas.

So how do you come up with ideas for books and novels?

Here are some of my methods:

1. Inversion

Take stories from the mainstream and flip them. Swap protagonists and antagonists. Instead of the usual villains, try different perspectives. Ask yourself: What happens if the roles are reversed? This approach creates fresh perspectives because mainstream storytelling rarely explores them.

2. Scale and Variation

Make everything bigger or smaller. Exaggerate or minimize.

For example:

• An intimate relationship saves the world (two people must fall in love or the world ends).
• A nuclear apocalypse is about to happen, but the protagonist is too busy trying to return an old video to the last remaining Blockbuster store because he refuses to pay the late fees.

Playing with scale often produces unexpected and interesting ideas.

3. Write What You Know — But Also What You Want to Know

Start with what you know, such as personal experiences.

But don’t stop there. Explore things you’re curious about. If something feels new and exciting to you, it might feel fresh to readers as well.

4. Create Unique Characters First, Then the Story

James Bond movies follow a very predictable formula. Yet audiences still look forward to the next one. Why? Because the character is compelling.

Create a character people love, and you can build stories around that character for decades.

5. Think About Jobs and Hobbies

What we do makes us interesting. When generating ideas, start by thinking about interesting occupations or hobbies your character might have.

Examples:

• An undertaker who brings widows together so they can fall in love again.
• A priest who believes God commands him to fight crime — using a “holy gun.”

The more unusual the activity, the more interesting the story potential.

6. Make Bad Ideas Better

Sometimes the best ideas come from improving things that didn’t work.

For example, recent entries in big franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek disappointed me. That’s why I started taking notes for my own sci-fi/fantasy epic.

Another example is the wave of “badass female spy” movies, often starring Charlize Theron. Many of these films simply try to make women behave like male action heroes which renders the stories unbelievable.

Instead of copying that formula, I asked myself: How could I write an action story with a female lead that feels believable and has its own tone?

This idea now sits in my idea bank under the title Suburban Housewives, and I plan to turn it into a full novel soon.

7. Freewriting and Mind Mapping

Set a timer for 10 minutes and write down everything that comes to mind. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t judge the ideas. The goal is simply to brainstorm freely and let your mind explore possibilities.

8. Use the News

We live in extremely crazy times. Watch 15 minutes of the daily news and you’ll often find story ideas hiding in real-world events. Reality is frequently stranger than fiction.

9. Use Writing Prompts

Websites like Reedsy offer large collections of writing prompts. There are many other sources as well.

Today you can also use AI tools. Just ask an AI to generate five writing prompts. You can make the prompts more specific by adding a genre or mood.

Examples:

• “Give me five horror story ideas in the style of Stephen King involving everyday objects that come to life.”
• “Generate five novel ideas inspired by the movie Interstellar: science fiction with time travel and family drama.”
• “Five book ideas inspired by The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: philosophical stories about strong individualists in modern society.”
• “Take a classic fairy tale and invert it: villains become heroes. Give me five variations.”
• “Combine two genres — fantasy and thriller — and generate five ideas with exaggerated elements (for example, magic on a global scale).”

Have your favorite AI model generate five new ideas every day. Eventually you’ll encounter one that feels strong enough to turn into a book.

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Storing Ideas

In the beginning, collect everything — even bad ideas. The goal is to build the habit of writing ideas down. There’s nothing worse than having a great idea, failing to record it, and then forgetting it later. You’ll remember that it was a good idea, but you won’t remember what it actually was.

So write it down immediately. Always.

I use digital tools like Notion (the basic version is free).

I created a simple table that includes:

• Working title
• Short description
• Genre
• Status
• Rating (added later so it doesn’t interfere with brainstorming)

When you finish a book project, go back to your idea bank and choose the next concept to develop.

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How to Rate Your Ideas

Separate the evaluation process from idea generation. As mentioned earlier, write down every idea — even if it initially seems bad. If you evaluate ideas immediately, you may stop writing them down, and that destroys the brainstorming habit.

Once a week, review your ideas and rate them based on four criteria:

1. Passion — How much do you want to write this story?
2. Originality — Has someone already done something similar?
3. Marketability — Would people want to read it?
4. Doability — Can you realistically write it?

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Getting Feedback

After rating your ideas, you can also seek feedback:

• Friends and family
• Writing communities (forums or local groups)
• The internet (Reddit, blogs, X)
• AI tools (ask Grok whether the idea works and why)
• Your own instinct (write 1,000 words and see if the idea still excites you)

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Conclusion

This is my current approach to generating story ideas. It has already produced far more ideas than I could ever realistically write. The interesting part is that once you train your brain to think creatively, new ideas start appearing almost automatically — often while you’re working on another project.

Try this guide, keep what works for you, and discard what doesn’t. Over time, you’ll develop your own reliable system for generating story ideas.

I’m a Trekkie. I fell in love with the franchise during the Next Generation era and regularly went to the theater to see the feature films in the 1990s.

However, during J.J. Abrams’ reboot films, I gradually lost interest. When Discovery was announced, I decided to give it a try—but I stopped watching after two episodes. I never even checked out the other “new” Star Trek iterations. Maybe I will someday.

Even though I haven’t seen the latest attempt to revive the franchise—the Starfleet Academy series—I can already understand why so many people seem upset about it.

From the clips I’ve watched and the reviews I’ve read, it appears that the established brand has once again been used as a mask. Behind that mask is something that doesn’t feel like the Star Trek many fans once knew. Instead, it seems to contain stories the creators wanted to tell anyway—stories that might not attract much attention without the Star Trek label attached.

The problem with this approach is that it may buy you a season or two, but eventually fans recognize that, despite the branding, they aren’t really getting Star Trek. At that point, interest fades, and the show gets cancelled and the movies become busts.

We’ve seen this happen before—not only with Star Trek, but also with other major franchises. The pattern feels familiar enough that it’s easy to predict where Starfleet Academy might be heading.

That said, I hope I’m wrong. I still love Star Trek and want future series to capture what made it so special in the 1990s. But again, I haven’t watched a single episode of Starfleet Academy, but the online discussions surrounding it seem to echo the same concerns seen in other modern franchise shows.

The broader lesson for storytellers is: Write your own stories. Create your own worlds. Develop your own characters. If a story can’t generate interest on its own, attaching it to an established franchise won’t magically make it compelling. It will just expose weak writing and destroy the fans’ love for the franchise itself.

Brands like Star Wars and Star Trek have endured for decades. Whether they can fully recover from this era of horrible storytelling remains to be seen.

What a great first half this movie had. It was novel, sharp, suspenseful, and all-around compelling. Beautiful storytelling and confident filmmaking. And then… the second half began.

I’ve always liked movies with a limited setting. Constraints often force creativity. Try writing a story in which no one can speak. Imagine a story that takes place entirely inside a car. Or one that features only a single character.

Limitations like these instantly spark curiosity and suggest a strong, focused premise.

Heretic takes a similar approach, limiting its setting to a single house with only three characters. And for about an hour, the filmmakers execute this premise wonderfully. I was genuinely on the edge of my seat, eager to discover where it would all lead. Framing a classic captivity-horror scenario within a theological debate was a refreshing idea. It gave the film a unique identity. Well done.

But after that first hour, everything slowly falls apart. The tension weakens, the focus blurs, and we’re left with a lackluster resolution in the final ten minutes. To bring the story to its conclusion, the film even abandons logic and internal consistency, relying on one deus ex machina after another.

Heretic is a great example of a story built on a strong — perhaps even brilliant — idea that works beautifully for half a film, only to lose its way because the ending can’t live up to the premise.

And that dynamic makes Heretic feel like a let down despite it being one of the best movies of the last couple of years.

Having a great idea is winning half the battle. But if you can’t carry that idea through to a satisfying conclusion, your audience will feel betrayed.

Interestingly, the opposite can also be true. The movie Barbarian, which operates in a similar genre, had the reverse effect on me. During its first half, I was close to losing interest. But then the story took a bold and unexpected turn, delivering a much stronger second half. When the credits rolled, I didn’t feel disappointed — I felt rewarded.

The lesson is simple: Once you’ve found a great idea for a story, don’t fully commit to developing it until you’ve found an ending that is just as strong — or even stronger.

Because in storytelling, how you finish often defines how your audience remembers the whole experience.

I watched the third installment of the Knives Out franchise yesterday—and I liked it. It’s a good movie, and even one of the better films of the year. It’s obvious that everyone involved had a lot of fun making it, and that Rian Johnson is a smart writer.

Yes, he messed up Star Wars—but only because Kathleen Kennedy allowed him to. Johnson’s filmography proves time and again that he can write clever, original stories. Wake Up Dead Man is a great example of his ability to deliver smart, well-constructed plotlines.

That said, the one thing that almost made me give up on the movie was the first act. It’s simply too long. More than half an hour passes before we get the first murder victim. After that, the movie really picks up steam and keeps you on the edge of your seat. At times, it’s downright brilliant—just like the first two Knives Out films. But I can imagine some viewers dropping out during the first act because it drags a bit.

The best way to get people interested in your story is to start with a bang. Throw the audience straight into the action—just like Tom Cruise does in every Mission: Impossible movie.

Of course, you need to develop the plot and characters at some point, or you won’t have a story at all. But first, you have to capture the audience’s attention before they’re willing to invest in your character and plot development.

As great as Wake Up Dead Man is, I would have started with the murder and then used flashbacks to convey the plot and character development that’s crammed into the first act.

Still, I liked the movie—a lot—and I highly recommend watching it.

I was hesitant to publish my first book in 2023. In fact, I was so hesitant that I kept it on my computer for years, even though it was already finished. I felt the same hesitation with my second book in 2024—and my third in 2024 as well. I guess, that feeling of “It’s not good enough” never really goes away.

After publishing three books and nearly a dozen short stories, I’ve come to an important conclusion: if you aim for perfection, you will never publish anything. Of course you should try to produce your best work, but if you obsess over perfection, no sentence will ever feel good enough—and you’ll never release anything at all.

What’s better: publishing a book that is “good enough,” or never publishing a book because it isn’t perfect?

Another thing to keep in mind is that even if you did reach perfection, some readers would still disagree. There are people on Amazon who give The Lord of the Rings one-star reviews. There are people who downvote YouTube videos of babies playing with puppies. Some crazy people rate Christopher Nolan movies 1 out of 10.

The lesson here is: Your idea of perfection will never be everyone’s perfection.

Since universal perfection is impossible, why try to reach it? Aim for creating a book that is good—and then release it instead.

With all of this in mind, I’ve established my third iron rule of writing: If something is finished, publish it. If you don’t, you’ll get stuck in editing limbo, endlessly trying to “fix” something that can’t be fixed anyway.

To sum up the iron rules so far:

1. Collect all ideas.
2. Work on one idea until you have a first draft.
3. Publish everything that is finished.