Generating Story Ideas

When generating story ideas, it serves best to be creative. For me, the process of forming new ideas is most slimier to my own writing process. I begin by choosing a newsworthy topic with relevance and importance, then visualize how that story idea will come about; who will be involved, who will it affect, what will be the message I’m trying to get across. This visualization process is what I believe helps me the most when generating new ideas. It encourages me to get creative in the way that I structure the idea itself. By seeing where, when, and who will be involved, it presents a unique perspective. The visualization allows me to see what obstacles, if any, would be involved in putting the story idea to action. By widening my perspective, I can better anticipate the challenges I will face, and the solutions to those problems along the way.

More times than not, one’s story idea will not play out as perfectly as planned. The solution? Come up with multiple back up plans if things fall through. To best prepare myself, I try to take the story idea I have in place, and create a couple more “outlet” stories that are in the same realm of my original idea. An example of this came up in the last couple weeks. I was recently working on a project involving the coverage of an event on campus called “Alumni Weekend”. My partner, Cam, and I had our original idea planned out and ready to go. We had our location, subjects, and theme of our package set and ready. It turned out, on the day of the event we couldn’t find any of our desired sources and our plan began to fall through. Being on a deadline, what ended up saving us was our story idea preparation. As we brainstormed ideas earlier in the week, we noted that there was an Alumni Brunch that was to be held at the same time our original story idea was to start. The Alumni Brunch story idea had similar subjects, and could reflect the main theme of our package which was to involve Alumni, regardless of the event they were actually participating in. This preparation made our transition very timely and swift.

When generating a story new idea, I remember to check all my bases. I look at the story idea, and then put into question all aspects of it. What happens if a certain source fails to show up, what if the event gets cancelled, etc. For me, the best defense to a problematic-story-idea is eliminating any chance of those problems actually effecting the end product of the project. Generate ideas that check all your bases, and basically become fail-safe story ideas. There’s always an opportunity to have a story within a story. Widen your perspective, and let the story ideas flow into your brainstorm.