Oodles of story ideas!

Pic­ture Book Marathon 2011 Logo, by Nathan Hale

I’m behind on the Pic­ture Book Marathon and have some seri­ous catch­ing up to do, so I’m going to make this short, but thanks to this Pic­ture Book Marathon blog post, I dis­cov­ered some great new sto­ry idea resources that I just have to share!
Author Rick Wal­ton has some great tips for com­ing up with sto­ry ideas here. He lists a bunch of dif­fer­ent ways you might get start­ed with a sto­ry. For exam­ple, choose a char­ac­ter, a quest, or even just a phrase–just about any­thing that comes to mind–then fol­low it, and see where it goes.
To help with that, he’s also com­piled lots and lots of amaz­ing brain­storm­ing lists for chil­dren’s book writ­ers, which you can find here. A few of my favorites include:

If you can’t find some sto­ry ideas in there some­where, you might want to try a new career. Maybe brick lay­ing or air traf­fic con­trol? (Oh wait, that’s what MY high school apti­tude test said I should do. I guess you’re on your own.)

7 thoughts on “Oodles of story ideas!”

  1. Hey, me too on the Air Traf­fic Con­troller, but keep­ing track of plot, char­ac­ters, set­ting, theme, etc. is a lot like ATC. Come to think of it, build­ing a sto­ry is like lay­ing bricks, too. See? That apti­tude test was right! It was the media they got wrong. Thanks for all the resources, Laurie.

    Reply
  2. Glad you guys liked it, KJ and Deb. Thanks for read­ing and commenting!
    Ha, Deb, I guess you’re right! And here I thought they were try­ing to tell me I had absolute­ly no cre­ativ­i­ty. I much pre­fer your way of look­ing at it! 😉

    Reply

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