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    366 Story Seeds
    366 Story Seeds
    366 Story Seeds
    Ebook766 pages39 minutes

    366 Story Seeds

    By Neil Shooter

    ()

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    About this ebook

    An idea is only the first step. Questions build stories. You must interrogate an idea, and learn to see it from different angles. You need to find the story within the setting.
    The more you do, the better you do. The best way to learn to do something is to do it over and over again.

    In 2016 I resolved to write 366 short stories, one for every day of the leap year. I failed miserably at that, but came out the other end with 11 self-published stories, dozens of almost complete drafts, and hundreds of partially developed stories. It was a great writing year, and it was so great because every single day I was working on a new idea, from scratch. The point of the exercise had been to practise writing short stories, and I succeeded in doing that 366 times.

    If you write 366 stories, it is surely impossible for them all to be bad?
    Find a way to germinate these story seeds. They are prompts, ideas, starting points for thinking about stories.
    One of your stories, or some of them, will be gold.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNeil Shooter
    Release dateOct 1, 2018
    ISBN9780463102169
    366 Story Seeds
    Author

    Neil Shooter

    I grew up in Robin Hood Country, spent some time in the sprawling metropolises (?) of London, England, and Toronto, Canada, and now I've found a quiet corner of rural Ontario to put myself out to pasture in.I'm always in search of my serenity and my muse.I try to read, and to write, a little bit every day, so that my gears keep turning...Some of the results can be found on Medium at medium.com/@nshooter11.Thanks for reading!

    Read more from Neil Shooter

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      Book preview

      366 Story Seeds - Neil Shooter

      Getting ideas is hard. I used to really struggle with finding them. I didn’t know where to look. I didn’t understand how writers got their ideas.

      Now I do. I realized that we walk through a soup of ideas every single day, and that the trick is to notice them, to recognize them, and most importantly, to record them.

      I learned that the more I looked for ideas, the more I found ideas. Your mind gets used to looking at the world a certain way. If that way is full of curiosity, and dreams, and possibilities, then the universe responds in kind. Sounds too good to be true, I know.

      Having a collection of ideas is only the first step. You must investigate the idea, and examine it. You ask the idea questions. Why is it like this? What needed to happen to make it possible? What are its consequences? What does it mean?

      Once you’ve interrogated an idea, and you have a good grasp of it, you must ask the idea what makes it a great one. I would find so many times that my interrogation had resulted in a wonderful and interesting setting, but that I still hadn’t found the story. I had to keep asking myself, But where is the story?

      A story is when something happens to someone. Things change. People evolve. Events have consequences. Quite often heroes win and villains lose. Not everyone lives happily ever after. People have feelings. They fall in and out of love. They go on adventures. They hope. They fear. They brave their fears. They face their demons. Or they are consumed by those fears.

      In 2016 I resolved to write 366 short stories, one for every day of the leap year. I failed miserably at that, but came out the other end with 11 self-published stories, dozens of almost complete drafts, and hundreds of partially developed stories. It was a great writing year, and it was so great because every single day I was working on a new idea, from scratch. Sometimes the lure of previous stories would be too strong to resist, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the point of the exercise had been to practise writing short stories, and I succeeded in doing that 366 times.

      Use my 366 story seeds from 2016 to practise building stories with. Use the 366 story seeds however works best for you. There are some suggested methods in the next section. Writing is YOUR thing, so do it in a way that works for YOU.

      As long as you write, you win.

      How to use this book [Back to top]

      These 366 Story Seeds are a leap year's worth of writing prompts, one story seed for every day.

      Each is a prompt, a question, or an idea, to give you a starting point.

      Plan A: Write every day, if you can.

      Think of the story seeds as assignments with deadlines. I always liked the idea of assignments and the structure of having a deadline. Treat each story seed

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