An idea is the first step and the building block of a story. To make a story appealing, you must start with a good idea that is potencies enough to catch a reader’s attention. So, the question is, how to get ideas for stories and where to find them?
One might say that there are limitless ideas around us, all we need is a perspective with a creative vision to make stories out of them. Well, that might be true but not all ideas turn into stories. Sometimes due to lack of perspective and sometimes the ideas are not enough themselves. It’s not necessary that an idea must be unique, the thing that must be unique is the story and to do that, one can totally get influenced by others. So, where to start? Well, there are lots of source for ideas on the internet. 5 such sources are covered in this article where you can to get ideas for short stories. Let’s check them out.
Also read: Create Interactive Stories Online with Multiple Possible Endings
5 Free Websites To Get Ideas For Short Stories:
PicLits.com
PicLits is a creative writing site which uses beautiful images along with relevant keywords to inspire its users. This website shows you an image with a scrolling list of images on top of it. For each picture, it gives you a list of carefully selected nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. You can drag and drop these words on top of the picture and create a ‘PicLit‘ of inspiration. It also has a “FreeStyle” mode where you can type your own words and place them on the picture. In the “FreeStyle” mode, you still get relevant keyword suggestions. This way, you can get creative ideas for short stories here based on pictures. You can also save these idea PicLits for later use.
Get picture-based creative ideas for short stories here.
Plot-Generator.org
Plot-Generator is a free online tool to generate story ideas. When you open this tool, it gives you a random story idea with options to generate more ideas. Here, you can enter the number of ideas you want to generate along with an option to select what kind of ending you want in those ideas. It gives you four options for the ending: happy, sad, twist, and any. You can your input choices and generate the desired number of ideas for short stories. From there, you can copy-paste those ideas for safe keeping.
Generate ideas for short stories with Plot-Generator here.
Reedsy.com
Find ideas for short stories onReedsy here.
TheWritePractice.com
TheWritePractice is an online platform to practice your writing. This website has a post that covers 100 short stories ideas which you can use to kick-start your writing. First, it gives you some essentials tips on how to start writing. Then, it lists top 100 ideas for short stories. These 100 stories ideas are sorted in batches. The list starts with 10 general story ideas followed by 10 Thriller Story Ideas, 20 Mystery Story Ideas, 20 Romance Story Ideas, 20 Sci-Fi Story Ideas, and 20 Fantasy Story Ideas. All these ideas are pretty interesting. You can choose any of them as per your liking and start writing a short story around that.
Get ideas for short stories on TheWritePractice here.
TheJohnFox.com
The next website to get creative ideas for short stories on this list is TheJohnFox. This website has a post under its Creative Writing Prompts that covers 72 creative ideas for short stories. Here, you can find ideas for Humor, 2 Characters or less, Adventure, Friendship/Family, Twist, Power, Super Natural, Romance, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, Crime (Mystery/Revenge), Dystopian/Futuristic, Children, and Historical writing. Each of these categories covers 5 ideas which you can use to get inspiration and use write your story.
You can check out these ideas for short stories here.
Closing Words:
These are the 5 free websites where you can get ideas for short stories. These websites give you the lists of ideas according to genres or types. Roam through these lists and find ideas that interest you the most. And when you get the idea(s), start your imagination and write your story.
