There is NEVER a time when there are no story ideas, just a time when you don’t see them.

One of the most overused expressions or words for writers is you have no story ideas and you've hit a creative wall. No, you haven't had a creative wall at all, but what do you have done is blinded yourself to all the stories that are surrounding you and crying out to be written. Yes, crying out and you are not listening.

Does that sound pompous to you? I don't mean to be, but let me tell you that I was there once, and I've since come away overwhelmed by story ideas. It started at a PR agency, where I attended last-minute brainstorming meetings for new clients' products/services.

You know what it's like to be on the firing line and expected to come up with brilliant campaign ideas. The pressure is intense, and the competition from your peers doesn't help, either.

What happened to me in those meetings was I let my creative mind loose, and it ran like a galloping stallion over ideas, big and small, useful or idiotic. It didn't matter as long as I was producing ideas, and that, in turn, brought a new realization to other people.

Ideas sparked more ideas, leading to incredible outcomes. But it was always a challenge, and depending on the department that was calling us, the challenge could be daunting.

Here's another thing I've learned. Learning to write is not achieved by reading many books on writing. Prolific writers' videos reinforced my belief about reading many writing books. The authors all said one thing: write and keep writing; it doesn't matter if you like what you're writing.

What matters is that you write. True, you may get a better idea about outlining or whether it’s first-person or third-person writing or whatever view you decided on for your story. You can pick up some tips, but in the long run, it will not be what you hoped it might be.

If those books were so great at what you thought they could do, don't you think the bestseller list would be piled with all the books that people had written after they read all those writing books? I suspect few of them read those writing books, but they may have attended some writing seminars or taken writing courses in college. But even those aren’t essential. Writers write alone. And alone is where the ideas come to you.

Try an Exercise

You've now read a bit about my philosophy of ideas or creativity regarding writing and I should give you some examples. Right? So, let's begin simply wherever you happen to be sitting right now as you read this.

Take a look around you and begin to see things not as objects or a place or a time. Do a mental Picasso drawing in your mind. What do I mean by that? It's simple. If you see an object, let's say it's a coffee cup, be a little bit dystopian and write something from the view of the coffee cup. Make it an inanimate object, but one that is able to think and feel, and write from that perspective.

Everything you see can be just as Walt Disney envisioned; things (like marching brooms) have personality if you give it to them. That's the magic of writing. You can make anything you see into something that nobody else may have thought about before or that you never thought about.

What about a pair of rain shoes or an umbrella in a stand by the side of the wall? What does that umbrella see? Where did it go, and what secrets does it hold? Now you're getting into the genre of Agatha Christie. Once you begin that journey, you will find it will lead you someplace, and the story has started, and you are spinning it out.

The one thing you must have is a challenge or problem that the main character or the item needs to overcome or solve. They can do this once, twice, or three times, but you want them to be successful. Keep that in mind, as you write your outline.

And, speaking of outlines, you really need three things: person or object in the setting, the problem, and the conclusion you can set this up for yourself so that you know where the story needs to go, and you don't get lost.

I read almost every interview I could find with Truman Capote because I was interested in his technique. He was very successful and I enjoyed several of his books and short stories, including "A Christmas Memory," "Hand Carved Coffins," “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” and "Other Voices, Other Rooms."

Capote wrote on yellow legal tablets with a Blackwing 602 pencil. John Steinbeck and Vladimir Nabokov also used this specific pencil.

He wrote usually wrote three handwritten and edited drafts before he was satisfied with the final product. But the one distinctive thing that he did was that he started his books from the end and then worked forward. As I recall, he indicated this enabled him to know where the story was going to go so that he didn't get lost in the writing. It's unorthodox, but it worked.

As I said before, use Picasso's technique. Remember, Picasso's paintings showed all aspects of something, not just the plane we would see straight on. He showed us anything that was under an object or around an object, and this was modern art. He gave an example for writers, but many of us didn't see it. He tried to tell us that our writing could do something similar and show us things we couldn't see. Yes, that may sound convoluted, but give it some thought.

If you want to write, write. I will never forget being at a mental health center where one worker told us a touching story. A patient, a Black woman in her 60s, wanted to write stories, but she had no paper. She took brown shopping bags (at that time, all stores gave us brown shopping bags) and a small pencil that someone had given her, and she wrote her stories on that paper.

They never told us if anyone read her stories or if there was any attempt to publish them in any form. If there's a moral here, it's that she had a need to write, and she managed to find a way to do it, even in her current situation where she had almost no money to buy anything. She is and was an inspiration for all of us.