How do I Come up With a Story

“How do you come up with your ideas?”

“You have such a great imagination; how do you do it?”

“Your story goes with your picture so well. How’d you find a picture to match it so well?”

These are all questions I’ve been asked by several of my readers, and being bored and in between writings, I thought I would answer the questions. The answers are pretty straightforward and may or may not surprise some of you.

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The first thing I do when writing a story is look through pictures. I look till I find one that inspires me, and then I decide if I can make a story or poem out of it. Sometimes, a picture inspires the words, but I must find an image differently.

The story or poem seldom comes to me before I find a picture, but I can generally find a satisfactory image when it does.

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• Pixabay
• Unsplash
• Pexels
• Domain Free Images
• Copyright Free Images
• Facebook Vocal group challenge posts

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• Nightcafe creations
• Free Word Cloud Generator
• Goggle Edit / Text Tool

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When I find a picture that inspires me, I immediately save it to the draft page on Vocal. Then, I wait for a story to come to me. Usually, I have a general idea of how I want a story to go from what is in the pictures. Once that general idea is hammered out, the rest of a fiction story or a poem is easy. It’s taken me anywhere from thirty minutes to three weeks to fine-tune a tale or poem to the point where I am happy enough to submit it on Vocal.

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If the picture just inspires a story but is not worthy of having a narrative made of it OR if I come up with a story before I even look for a picture, that’s when I create my own. Out of all the AI-generated art, Nightcafe Creation is my favorite to use. It’s easier, and I can get what I want with just a few tweaks of the wording. I created what I wanted with the Free Word Cloud in a few instances or edited a background photo from Pixabay with text.

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That’s it. That’s all I do– a straightforward process. My creativity depends on what is in a picture—nothing to it. Anyone can tell a story this way.

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Stories lined all up in a row

Stacked two to three high

All waiting to be told

All waiting to be read

Words gathered in groups

Piled into paragraphs

And stanzas

All vying to be written

All wanting out of my imagination

Just these old tales in my head

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