Amazing Fiction Story Ideas Start With A What If Question

When you are writing novels or short stories, you need to find excellent fiction story ideas.

Nothing happens on a blank page, and looking at it is the worst way to start writing. A lot of writers use creative writing prompts, but they aren’t the best way to come up with original ideas.

Some writers wait for the muse to arrive, which usually works on a very unreliable schedule.

But a much better way to find new story ideas is to ask this question: What if?

The germs of story ideas for fiction

But I’m not referring to contagious germs. What I mean is that the germ of an idea was the starting point for many great fiction authors.

Instead of agonizing and wringing your hands, keep your mind open to small questions or thoughts you have every day.

These little germs of ideas can develop and grow very quickly into fabulous story ideas to write a new book.

To give you a concrete example, I came up with a simple idea while I was teaching.

My class of English beginners was learning about ordinal numbers, so I naturally used dates and monarchs as examples.

While my students worked together in pairs, I had a weird what-if thought. What if Queen Elizabeth’s parents had a sense of humor and had named her June, May, or even April?

My thoughts about Queen April the First led me to funny ideas about monarchs, rulers, and the Gregorian calendar.

The result was a science fiction farce, February the Fifth, which became the first book in a four-book series.

The germ for me was ordinal numbers. Who would ever think one could write a story about that?

Famous authors and small ideas

It is surprising how simple some fiction story ideas, or story starters, were for many famous books.

Here are some examples of what famous authors said about how they came up with their ideas for novels.

Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games

One night, I was lying in bed, and I was channel surfing between reality TV programs and actual war coverage.

On one channel, there’s a group of young people competing for I don’t even know; and on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting in an actual war.

I was really tired, and the lines between these stories started to blur in a very unsettling way. That’s the moment when Katniss’s story came to me. Quoted from the School Library Journal.

George Orwell – Animal Farm

I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn.

It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. Quoted from Wikipedia.

Mark Haddon – Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

It came from the image of the dead dog with the fork through it. I just wanted a good image on that first page.

To me, that was gripping and vivid, and it stuck in your head. Only when I was writing it did I realize, at least to my mind, that it was also quite funny.

But it was only funny if you described it in the voice that I used in the book. So the dog came along first, then the voice. Only after a few pages did I really start to ask, Who does the voice belong to? 

So Christopher came along, in fact, after the book had already got underway. Quoted from Powell’s Books.

Kazuo Ishiguro – Remains Of The Day

It started with a joke that my wife made. There was a journalist coming to interview me for my first novel.

And my wife said, Wouldn’t it be funny if this person came in to ask you these serious, solemn questions about your novel and you pretended that you were my butler?

We thought this was a very amusing idea. From then on I became obsessed with the butler as a metaphor. Quoted from the Paris Review.

J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter

In 1990, my then-boyfriend and I decided to get a flat and move to Manchester together. We would flat hunt every once in awhile.

One weekend after flat hunting, I took the train back to London on my own, and the idea for Harry Potter fell into my head, Rowling told Urbanette magazine.

Coincidentally, I didn’t have a pen and was too shy to ask anyone for one on the train, which frustrated me at the time, but when I look back it was the best thing for me.

It gave me the full four hours on the train to think up all the ideas for the book. Quoted from Newsweek.

Although it is only a sample of thoughts from a few famous authors, you can see that all the ideas started with extremely simple thoughts.

It proves that some of the best novels have often come from an inkling of an idea rather than a grand plan.

Ask yourself what if questions

Many well-known authors think that a good idea comes from a simple question. What if?

Stephen King says this:

I get my ideas from everywhere.

But what all of my ideas boil down to is seeing maybe one thing, but in a lot of cases it’s seeing two things and having them come together in some new and interesting way, and then adding the question.

‘What if?’ ‘What if’ is always the key question.

Neil Gaiman on story ideas

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if…?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term – but you didn’t know who?)

Another important question is, If only… Quoted from Neil Gaiman.

I can imagine that Douglas Adams wondered one day, what if aliens blew up Earth?

Or Jasper Fforde might have wondered, what if nursery rhyme characters came to life and started committing crimes?

What if is the key question when hunting for story ideas for fiction writing.

Avoid writing prompts

You can find thousands of writing prompts on the Internet.

They can be helpful for writing practice, especially for writing short stories, but they lack the spark or germ of an idea.

If I take one prompt at random, you can see that it is, in fact, a story outline.

Write a story about how a little boy is running toward your main character, a look of absolute joy lighting up their face. Then they freeze, their joy turning to anger, rage. Your character cocks their head, confused, and then the truth hits them. He must be one of the Ruin Children, born from the people affected by the Great Tragedy.

Using prompts like this is fine if you are starting out as a new writer.

But prompts such as writing about one of your family members or about a fantastic thing you did in high school are ideas that are definitely not going to help you write a great fiction novel.

The downside of writing prompts is that they are not original.

As a writer, you need to rely on your thoughts and ideas and not those of others.

Summary

The key to finding great ideas to write about is your simplicity of thought. Listen to your mind.

Don’t make it a complex process of searching the Internet for clues that could block the originality of your thoughts.

Think about using what if, I wonder, and if only questions to help you find a brilliant new idea.

What if I discovered that my husband of thirty years was a foreign spy?

I wonder what would happen if you could clone the dead back to life?

Then, once you have the spark of a great idea, you can move on to creating an outline for your terrific new story.

Related reading: In Fiction Writing, The Devil Is In The Details Of Your Plot