Searching the Universe for Ideas

I've been blogging about writing in a more literary fashion.  The first critical step in any writing endeavor is to seek out an idea, a story concept.  There are many ways to do this, but some are likely to lead to more literary works than others.  Writing in a literary fashion is about building and revealing meaning beyond the surface.  If one plans to do so from the very beginning, it can be easier. 

You can just wander your world and look for interesting events, bits of dialogue, or people.  Observing the world may help you come up with a quirky or interesting alternative explanation for what you find.  This, alone, won't necessarily lead to literary stories, but it could give you some vivid descriptions and characters, which can be added to a story you're working on.  It's possible that observation can lead to some fascinating and literary stories.  As I said, literary stories are all about building and revealing meaning beneath the surface.  Sometimes, that can be harder to do when one starts with reality than when one starts with something already rife with cultural meaning.  In books like 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell started with cultural observations and turned those observations into social commentary still impacting our lives today.  In A Modest Proposal, Swift merged satire with social commentary in order to make a biting and literary piece.  Writing from observation can certainly be done and done well, especially if one approaches it from a social commentary perspective. 

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You can also find story ideas from historical events.  Many of Shakespeare's famous pieces turned history into literary fiction, as did Homer's Odyssey and The Illiad, among countless others.  Books like these form the backbone of modern western literature. The key is not to just recount the events as they occurred but to imbue the events with meaning beyond just the facts of the story.  Otherwise, it's just history.  Every line and event needs to have more than the obvious meaning, and every scene needs to have multiple layers like you may find in books like The Help. The story should not be simply a recounting of facts but an interweaving of story, meaning, and fact. 

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A reader can also use dreams to shape meaning and tell stories.  A dream is full of personal and sometimes general symbolism.  There are countless books of dream interpretation, or one can take a dream and turn it into whatever you want it to be.  You may dream of yourself, but your main character doesn't have to remain you.  You can use your dream as a starting point to spin something new, as several writers have done such as in The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Catch-22, and Frankenstein.  However, if you just record the events of the dream, it probably won't make coherent sense, let along literary meaning.  As with history or fact, the dream is just a jumping off point.  It's up to you to build meaning and literary merit. 

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Also, a writer can use a literary source to create something new.  This can be done to an extreme like in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, wherein the original text is simply added to with new motifs and zombie-fighting events.  However, more commonly, a writer will take a fairy tale, Shakespeare play Jane Austen novel, the Bible, or any such text and turn it into a new story.  James Joyce's Ulysses and Eudora Welty's The Robber Bridegroom come to mind. 

Any of these sources can produce effective literary weight in its subject matter if the writer is careful.  The important thing is to read a lot within whatever genre you want to write and figure out what works for you.