Reducing [fiction]

IDEA: Teach kids to compete against themselves and not with others

On the Mississippi [video game]

Design a Video Grame where you pilot a steamboat up the Mississippi, alongside Mark Twain.

Badge [fiction]

IDEA: The brief, intense life of a journalist who lacked the courage he wrote about.

The Deerfield Massacre [fiction]

IDEA: Native Americans, tired of constant harassment, strike back at their persecutors.

20/10 [short story]

IDEA: A young ballplayer is hit on the head and discovers that the blow has given him exceptional sight….

“Pollyticks as Usial” [mystery dinner]

IDEA: The Mayor is murdered during a Town Hall debate on a public works project.

About Me, the Idea-Man

My name’s Drew Davidson, and I’ve been coming up with creative writing Ideas all of my life. Most of that life was taken up with a career that gave me little time for writing, so those happy little thoughts shriveled and died on the vine.

I changed my career track about 10 years ago, going back to school for Creating Writing. Instead, a pleasant sidetrip into theatre changed my direction once again. But it never stopped me from thinking.

Now that I’m back to writing full-time, I’ve got a collection of Ideas that I’ll never in my life (half of it has already been lived) flesh out and develop. And one of my first writing Ideas was to create a blog to give my Ideas an outlet.

I’m putting all the ideas listed here into the public domain. You can have them if you want them. All you need to do is post a Comment saying that you’d like to see what you can make of them.

Good Luck!
Drew Davidson

Where I Get Ideas From

All of the ideas I post here as Idea Prompts are drawn randomly from some reference books I have in my personal library. Reference books can help in finding just the right detail to add to a story, but they can help in creating stories in the first place.

Among the books I’m flipping through are:

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Very basic concepts. If you have a humorous bent, you can look for ways to twist or warp what you find in here.

MacMillan Visual Dictionary. If you ever wanted to know the names of the individual parts of an jet engine, this is the book for you.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Awesome reference book; just open any page and colorful phrases tumble out.

Descriptionary: A Thematic Dictionary. Topics in this book cover all areas of knowledge and give me the most accessible ideas.

Random House Word Menu. Very deep and esoteric knowledge, but helpful if you want to immerse your story in a particular career or lifestyle.

Cambridge Biographical Dictionary. Anglo-centric, but a great way to find colorful characters to add to your stories.

Dictionary of Ideas. Originally published in England under the name of Hutchinson’s and release in the U.S. by Quality Paperback Book Club (QPB), this is a favorite of mine. Topics aren’t so easy to write about, but the give you a lot to think about.

The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations. Breaking down the 36 into dozens more, it’s a great source of ideas of budding playwrights and screenwriters.

Why I Want You to Steal My Ideas

I’ve spent a good chunk of my Life scribbling bits of Ideas on handy Scraps of Paper and transcribing them in handy Notebooks, only to later copy them into handy Computers.

Enough of this Idea-Hoarding! It’s time to open the Floodgate and let these Ideas find new Homes where they’ll be nurtured and encouraged to grow.

A person does’t need much Time to come up with Ideas. He just needs Time to work them into polished Writings that can make Money. *sigh* Time I don’t have much of; Ideas, I do have much of. And I’m happy to share them all with You.

Along with sharing my Ideas, I’m starting a Daily Idea Prompt. You see, I’ve never liked the Writing Prompts I found on the ‘net.

Sites with good Prompts, like Writer’s Digest, or Creative Writing Prompts, lumped a whole Bunch of them on one page; not good for ADD sufferers like myself.

Other Sites, which posted Prompts in a daily one-at-a-time fashion, relied on generic and hackneyed Topics, which never engaged my Imagination. What stirs the Creative Juices within me is a specific, unusual Idea, a new way of looking at a Familiar Subject. That’s what I hope to provide.

Let’s get to it, then…

Photo by Johan Jönsson