This piece of writing is intended to be a short article on finding and choosing a topic for your short story or poem. There are many ways to go about finding a topic. One way is to think of the “human condition”. This is an expression used at times when we read about the French writers Balzac and Maupassant, for example. Balzac wrote so many novels that he practically went from A to Z as far as the human condition is concerned. This means that the human condition entails just about everything that we humans are confronted with in our time on this earth e.g. birth, death, growing, learning, teaching, living, loving, hating, and so on. Think of a particular activity you enjoyed or hated as a child and write about it. You could also write about a particular person you loved or hated. This activity or person falls within the denomination of human condition. To transfer that activity or person to fiction, you need to “be” that person or one of the characters if you have the acting ability, let’s say, as well as to be “present” in the story while the activity is taking place. An example of the latter could be a bank robbery. You can be one of the customers in the bank or one of the employees. Of course, you can be a robber also. By being “there”, you are able to describe the robbery.
Another approach to finding a writing topic is to peruse the newspapers and magazines and stop and snip when you see an item or article that grabs your attention or activates your imagination. I used this approach in writing my story “Plantain”, posted now at authorsden.com. This approach is also mentioned in some of the Miss Marple stories that Agatha Christie wrote so well. Miss Marple gets some of her crime-solving ideas from a newspaper item, if I recall correctly.
Still another method is to use a real event that you are familiar with or that someone told you about. For example, you or they were in an earthquake, a flood, the attack on 9-11, or any other meaningful event.
Authorsden.com authors CJ Heck and Guy Hogan show us via their blogs, short stories, poems, and articles that a topic doesn’t have to be exotic necessarily (Somerset Maugham wrote lovely short stories using exotic locales.). A topic can be centered round an ordinary pet, object or ordinary view from the window. But one adds that certain feature (or happening) that changes the whole thing from ordinary to extraordinary or special.
Many times, when and if you feel stumped, the important thing is to keep writing. Inspiration will appear eventually while you are doing so. Read as much as possible (Many successful authors recommend this activity.). Many times an idea will come to you while you are reading about any number of topics.
My last suggestion is that you ask. Ask a child, for instance, what s/he likes. What s/he likes to do. When you listen to a child, you are often surprised. You often learn something from the child instead of ‘teaching’ her or him. Also, ask a friend or relative what they think you should write about. They will probably enjoy this “chance” for them to participate.
Thanks for reading.
