How I come up with book ideas - Author Video Transcripts
Video 1 Transcript
One of the main things that I do is I have a notes app on my phone and on the notes app I just list any idea that I have and that could be like some some quirky person that I meet that I think that's that's that'd be a great character for a book or some bit of dialogue that just kind of comes into my head and I'm like oh that would be pretty kind of you know that'd be funny or or that would be so deep um any like what if idea like what if the whole world exploded just any of that kind of stuff and I write it down and it's a really long note and then when it comes time to like construct a story I go through that note again and I start pulling pieces out that I think could work together it doesn't mean that I end up using I obviously have never used all of the ideas I have but even some of the ideas I have they don't end up making the cut but still having them there and accessible makes it so that there's a lot of creativity that goes into what I write
Video 2 Transcript
How I come up with book ideas. For me personally, I'll watch a TV show or read a book. I find that most authors are also very big readers themselves, and that means that you have to know what's selling and what's effective in the market that you are trying to write in, which is why the best authors tend to be big readers, because they are reading the kind of books that are selling. I come up with book ideas by reading a book and saying, you know what, I would rather read a book about this. And so I write the book that I want to read, or I see how somebody wrote a story a certain way, and I try to do it better.
Video 3 Transcript
How I come up with book ideas. I think a lot of being an author is being able to like see life and Catalog it in a way that you can remember and then put it into a great story Like for example this crazy series what started it is I was listening to somebody talk about history and I thought I think I thought history was boring as a kid What would be the coolest way? Right and I came up with some ideas of what schools might be like in the future for all the different subjects That's kind of what started the idea Right. This one's based on a true story of my daughter, right? so this is more real life how she faced a brain tumor with a lot of courage and humor and and Friends and stuff and this one I met a guy who had an eye problem, right? Degenerative eye disease. I thought man, that would be so hard to be like that, right? So it's about a kid who's drawing comics, but having a terrible eye disease and this one We just had some friends that had dealt with some some passing away
Video 4 Transcript
Book ideas are everywhere. I'm not kidding. The problem with once you start writing a book, then another idea comes and another idea comes and then another idea comes. So don't ever worry about book ideas. They will always come and it'll just be like a conversation with somebody or or another movie will trigger something or another just just just watching someone on the street and all of a sudden you're like wonder what their life is like and oh that would make an amazing story. So don't ever doubt ideas because they will definitely come and they come from everything that you do.
Video 5 Transcript
My name is Heather B. Moore. One way I come up with book ideas is through reading other books, or sometimes I'll hear a song, and other times maybe listening to a news program, or even a conversation. Once in a while I'll get together with other writer friends and we'll brainstorm ideas, and so you kind of bounce ideas off each other, and that also helps me make decisions based on maybe characters or plot arcs, or whether or not I should even start writing a certain book, whether I think readers will like to read it and the book will sell.
Video 6 Transcript
Hi, this is Tracy D. Smith. Most of my books, all of them actually, are historical fictions, and I've come up with real case scenarios and real life stories. So I have actually come up with most of mine through doing family research and finding cool stories about people that are not very well known. That's like my favorite thing to do. I just wrote a series about what would happen if certain aspects in history didn't happen. So I wrote about Commander Braddock's Red Sash. He's not a family member, but I lived in Virginia for several years, and I remember seeing the sash in the Mount Vernon Museum and thinking, wow, what would have happened if George Washington never got the sash and never became general of the Continental Army? What would happen? And that was during the French and Indian War. So I kind of come up with ideas of like the what-ifs, but also most of them are people that I have researched. And I'm like, these are amazing people. Why don't we know their stories?
