There are times ideas spring into your brain faster than you can get them on paper, but even the most prolific writer sometimes feels the frustration of staring at a blank page waiting for words that don’t want to come.

I’ve read several short story advice books that give the mildly infurating solution to “just start writing,” which is kind of like telling a lost traveler how great the subway is but not how to find the station. If I knew how to just start writing, I would already be doing it.

To be fair, I get what these writers are saying. Once you start putting words down, they build on each other sentence after sentence until you find that flow that carries you through to the end. The question is how to unlock those crucial first words to open the door for the story you want to tell. 

Toward that end, here are three exercises I’ve found helpful when I’m stuck and don’t know what to write. 

Exercise #1: Character + Conflict

With a fleshed-out character and a compelling conflict, you’re halfway to a great short story before you even write a word. You can create this kind of a scenario by building the world and story around a character. 

So let’s start there: choose your character. I often have characters running around my head waiting for a story, so if that’s the case for you pull one of them off the shelf. If a character’s not coming to mind, you could:

• Use somebody you know in real life
• Look through pictures online or in a magazine, and build a person from one of them into a character
• Find a stranger’s profile on your favorite social media or dating app and construct a fictional life for them
• Go to a café, bar, or park and create a character from someone you see there

Once you’ve got someone in mind, write a brief character sketch. Start with the outside: What are they wearing? Are they comfortable in it? What kind of shoes do they have on? Do they use makeup? How’s their hair styled? How old are they? What do their hands look like—are they smooth or callused? Are their nails manicured? Do they wear any rings? What about other jewelry?

Now bring them to life. What gestures do they make when they’re lost in thought? When they’re talking to someone they like? Someone they don’t? How do they react when they’re frightened? What about when they’re annoyed, or tense, or angry? Put them in motion. Is there anything distinctive about their gait? How fast do they walk? Do they look straight ahead, up and around, or down at their phone? 

Sometimes you’ll feel a burst of inspiration just from defining a character, and if that’s the case, run with it! For example, imaginging how your character scrunches up their face when they’re annoyed might lead you to what they’re annoyed about and, boom! You have a conflict and the foundation of a story. 

If this doesn’t happen, you can force the issue by giving them something to fight against. First, answer the question: What does your character want or need? It could be a physical object (money, a new car, a family heirloom, etc.), an intangible achievement (career progress, fame, winning a competition, etc.), an emotional need (love, acceptance, vengeance, etc.), or something else entirely—the important thing is that they have something to strive for.

Now, list out some things that could stand between your character and that goal. Don’t worry about whether they “make sense”—you can write a world that makes the absurd or fantastical feel logical. What you’re looking for is the thing that sparks your imagination and makes you curious enough to start writing.

Exercise #2: Start from “What if?”

A significant portion of the speculative fiction canon owes its existence to these two words. It can be a useful question for a realistic fiction writer, too, even if you’ll be asking different questions and looking in a different place for the answers.

Start by thinking of a normal, everyday thing. Something that most people can relate to or have experienced. Some examples if your imagination needs some seeding:

• Chores and errands (laundry, cooking, shopping, etc.)
• Commuting/traveling
• Work shifts or school days
• Entertainment (eating out, seeing a show, playing video games, etc.)
• Socializing (bars, parties, dates, etc.)

Got something in mind? Awesome. Now imagine you have a character doing that activity, and answer these questions:

• Who is the last person the character would want to see while they’re doing this activity? The last person they would expect to see?
• What is the worst thing that could go wrong, and what would the character need to do to fix it?
• What is one object, animal, or person the character wouldn’t expect to see while doing this activity, and what would they do if they saw it?
• What is the character’s biggest “pain point”? What do they like least about doing this thing, and what would make that even worse? What would make it better?
• Does the character enjoy doing this activity? If yes, why, and how could that go awry? If no, what would they rather be doing, and what’s stopping them?

As you’re answering these questions, look for the “What ifs?” that feel like they have narrative energy. What if the character’s creepy neighbor is in their usual laundromat—Do they go in anyway? Go to the one down the road instead? What if your character gets the worst customer they’ve ever had—what would make them the worst? How would the character respond? Answering these questions gets your character interacting with their environment, going through a series of scenes and moments that eventually add up to a story.

Exercise #3: Shift the focus.

One of the things I love about watching true crime is seeing how different people describe the same event. Even when someone’s not actively lying, the details they notice and how they interpret them changes how they describe what happened. This happens in everyday life, too. How you remember childhood family vacations is probably very different than how your parents would describe them; a tourist’s view of Mardi Gras in New Orleans is very different than that of the locals working in the bars on Bourbon Street.

How does this idea help you to write a story? Because there are untold stories lurking in the periphery of any event or well-known tale. Identifying what you’ll use as that foundation is the first step in this exercise. Some great places to start from include:

• Something memorable that you experienced first-hand
• Newspaper headlines, nightly news stories, and other current events
• Folk tales, fairy tales, fables, myths, and urban legends

Don’t think too much—just go with the first thing your brain throws at you. If it doesn’t work out, you can try again. 

Now, write out the potential POV options that aren’t the expected protagonist. If it was a real event, it may be helpful to look at some photos and find an interesting face in the background, but you can do this as well in your head.

An example might help here. Let’s say your event is a trip to Disneyworld you took for your 10th birthday. Go beyond yourself and your family and think about the bit characters: the ride operators and food vendors; the person inside that Mickey costume; the kid who puked on Space Mountain and made you wait an extra half hour before you could ride. 

 Once you’ve brainstormed a list, pick the one that intrigues you the most and flesh them out a bit. Let’s go with the puking kid. Why’d he puke? Who was he at the park with and why? Were his parents mad? Did they buy him a new shirt and keep riding or just go home? Was him puking on the ride the start of his story, the end of it, or somewhere in the middle?

Still not feeling the story? Shift the perspective again. Let’s move on to the ride operator who had to clean up after the kid. How was his day going before that? Does he like working at the amusement park? When does his shift end, and where’s he going after that? 

You can follow this same process when your source is another work of fiction, like a folk tale or urban legend. Most of Gregory Maguire’s catalog was built by doing this, and while the re-told fairy tale is well-trod territory, there are still plenty of stories to be told in this genre. Don’t just think about the other characters mentioned in the original tale, but also the unseen and implied figures. Are the servants in the Evil Queen’s castle evil, too? How does the rest of the pack feel about the Big Bad Wolf?

And you don’t need to stick to old stories, either. You can use any familiar world as your jumping off point, as long as you make the story and world your own by the end of the editing process. In other words, it’s okay to be inspired by picturing a sewage worker on the Death Star, but move them to a new station of your own invention. This isn’t just important for copyright reasons but it also gives you full freedom to shape the world to meet your story’s needs, rather than trying to draw it inside someone else’s lines.

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Inspiration is a very personal thing, but hopefully at least one of the exercises above helps you find an entry point for your next story! At the very least, they’re a way to start getting some words on the page.

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