February 18, 2022

If you are a writer, and have told people you are a writer, chances are you have gotten the question where do you get your ideas? It is one of the most popular question for writers. It’s very flattering because it implies your story is unique and cool and engaging, but it can also be a little tough to answer. Ideas are nebulous, shifting things that flit in and out of our brains at the speed of light. Everyone has ideas all the time. So, what makes writers so different? And why do some writers struggle with story ideas where others don’t?

This is where the Wonder Muscle comes in. The Wonder Muscle is the skill writers use to create story ideas no matter where they are or what they’re doing. A writer with a strong Wonder Muscle has tons of ideas in their back pocket and can come up with a new one at the drop of a hat.

The concept of a Wonder Muscle is by no means a new one. I certainly didn’t come up with it, and I think it is one thing all of us writers have in common and all those who want to be writers need to develop ASAP.

Let me illustrate how the Wonder Muscle works by sharing a concrete moment where I used my Wonder Muscle to think up what later became a 90,000-word adventure novel.

It all started with a baked potato.

One day, I was feeling a little crummy and trying to find something for lunch that wouldn’t aggravate my stomach. I settled on a plain baked potato. As I sat down to eat the potato, I was feeling sorry for myself. What was the point of baked potatoes if they weren’t slathered in chili and cheese? What a terrible, bland lunch this was.

Bored, I decided to distract myself by jumping down the rabbit hole of my whiny musings. I decided to flex my Wonder Muscle. Flexing your Wonder Muscle just means tuning in to the world around you, paying special attention to what you can observe with your senses, and choosing one observation to follow down a logical (or not so logical) path. I chose the potato.

It was a russet potato, the kind with the brown mottled skin that you have to wash thoroughly because you usually get it from the grocery store coated in a fine layer of dirt. Of course it’s covered in dirt, I mused. Potatoes are root vegetables, so they grow underground. What a miserable existence, I thought. A miserable existence underground just to turn into a vegetable that requires copious amounts of butter to be palatable. The underground sounds terrible.

I wonder what it’s like to live underground.

Pause! Right there! Do you see it? This is why I call this skill the Wonder Muscle. Most of the time, using the Wonder Muscle comes directly from a wondering thought or question. This was just a fleeting thought I had while eating my lunch. In the mind of a non-writer or someone with a weaker Wonder Muscle, the thought would flit on by and be forgotten in an instant. Using a Wonder Muscle captures these types of ideas instead and then deliberately makes the mind do a 180 to follow this new train of thought, this wondering, and allow it to lead to a story idea.

All self-pity wallowing stopped once I wondered about life underground. I immediately began thinking of what it would be like if I was trapped underground, like a cave in. Rocks and dust and dark dark dark. It’d be terrifying! What a horrible fate. Well, as a writer, it is my job to come up with terribly awful things to do to my characters, so I then plopped a no-name generic character into the underground.

Plopping a character in a setting demands a reason. Why was he underground, I asked myself. Well, he was adventuring, and then he fell in a hole (as you can see, this story idea was in its infant stages). Okay, if he fell underground that means he doesn’t normally live underground, so is he just hanging with the rocks and dust and potatoes? No, that’s boring. What else might live underground?

Rock…monsters? Sure, why not. A race of hobbit-like people? Toss them in. And buried treasure, because we can’t be underground and not find some shiny things. Add those to our unfortunate adventurer and what do we get?

A young man trapped underground, lost, hurt, scared, and hunted by rock monsters. His only hope is the goodwill of a race of people he never knew existed before, and lo and behold they have some nice shiny treasure thing that can save the above ground world from whatever problem led to our adventurer toppling down a hole in the ground. Politics! Danger! Glory and riches!

And that, my friends, is how a Wonder Muscle can create a story idea from a baked potato and a pity party.

Everyone has thoughts. We all think things all the time. Writers do not have special thoughts. We have control over our thoughts. Five people are sitting in a park, but only one is a writer. Suddenly, a bright red balloon comes sailing across the sky. All five people notice the balloon, observe it, have some questions about where it came from and what’ll happen to it, but what makes the writer different is they flex that Wonder Muscle and capture that fleeting thought to give it depth. The red balloon becomes a dirigible. It’s owned and operated by a smuggler currently chartered to help a defiant princess flee the Empire and start a war.

The more you use a Wonder Muscle, the more natural the process becomes. Make it a goal to come up with three to five new story ideas every day inspired by the ordinary things around you. They can be full plots, or they can just be a single character or a simple setting. If you want to be a writer, then you have to become a wonderer. Even if you have no interest in writing, let me tell you, once I started wondering, the world around me became richer, more vibrant, near magical. The mundane can light up your life and shower you in stories if you flex your Wonder Muscle.