Where do you get your ideas from?

It used to be that most of my stories were my own real-life situations that I wish had taken the turns that I describe. In the past year or so, I've ended up getting a lot of my inspiration from social media, including the advertisements:
> An ad for a porn site that featured fat women had a particularly appealing view of a woman from behind. Even though the ad wasn't explicit, it inspired a body-positive story about a man who meets a very attractive woman who incidentally is fat.
> Perhaps the most unusual example is my "Twerk Little Sister" series. I went to YouTube in the hopes that I could see the Maxwell Smart film "The Nude Bomb". I got a few results that were related, plus a bunch of twerking videos. I had the same reaction to one such video that the brother has in the first story.
> Most recently, I've had several stories inspired by people's "confessions" on Whisper, including the bulk of my incest fiction and a couple of cheating stories. (I rarely write the latter otherwise.)
 
Most of my story ideas come from daydreaming about some sort of idealized world where sex isn't loaded down with the emotional baggage that real life brings. People help each other heal, people make each other's lives richer. And people are usually a lot more intelligent and sensitive than real life people.

Jehoram said something about an ideal world like that, but I can't remember the quote or the context.
 
Jehoram said something about an ideal world like that, but I can't remember the quote or the context.

I think that what you're remembering is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, which I've used before:

"What Kilgore Trout's writing shared with pornography was not sex but visions of impossibly hospitable worlds."

Kilgore Trout was a character that wrote science fiction stories and books, which were printed in porno magazines to fill up the space that the pictures left. They never paid him.

I wrote an essay on my approach to erotica that quoted the passage, but I don't know if I ever posted it here. I'll have to check.
 
I think that what you're remembering is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, which I've used before:

"What Kilgore Trout's writing shared with pornography was not sex but visions of impossibly hospitable worlds."

That's it! That's the quote! "visions of impossibly hospitable worlds." I love that.
 
Ideas come from everywhere. They're easy. Generating them can become automatic. It's fleshing them out that's the hard part.

I recommend What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. First exercise: write the first line of a story. I'm inspired by the Bulwer-Lytton contest of the worst first lines of the worst stories. My favorite there:
"There's more than one way to skin a cat," she mused,
as she pinned its little feet to the dissection board.​
Anyway, write funny or enticing or absurd or sensuous first lines.

Second exercise: Write titles to go with those first lines. I came up with stuff like:

ROSES ARE RED, TOO - "What a lovely cock," she whispered, just before biting it off.
HOME ON THE RANGE - I'd been out here too long -- the sheep were looking enticing.
AN ACT OF CONGRESS - As the junior senator futilely plowed my ass with his pathetic little prick, I thought to myself, "The cloud-computing lobby is NOT paying me enough for this!"
BLACK MAGIC WOMAN - I knew I was in trouble when she threw my testicles into the stew pot.
STICK IT WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE - The dark side of Mercury is a bad place for an orgy.
HONKY TONK CHIMPANZEES - I knew I was doomed when Bertha blew me her simian kiss.
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED DAUGHTERS - How much did they need Daddy's love?
BLACK HOLE SUN - When the end of time came, I was enjoying great anal sex.
TEST CASE - Tis better to be Wasserman Positive than never to have loved at all.

Third exercise... well, you'll need to buy the book, eh? It's inexpensive.
 
Fantasy and wordplay. I recently came up with an idea for a story about a lesbian or bisexual woman with the skill of Therianthropy -- shape-shifting into animals -- after lying awake in bed and wondering randomly about the history of Native/Indigenous American gender variance. I have no idea if I'm ever going to write anything on this at all . . . but as I was exercising this morning, I continued to draft (in my head) the entire first chapter.

Like the others say, it's usually kind of random. . .
 
Ideas come from everywhere. They're easy. Generating them can become automatic. It's fleshing them out that's the hard part.

I recommend What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. First exercise: write the first line of a story. I'm inspired by the Bulwer-Lytton contest of the worst first lines of the worst stories. My favorite there:
"There's more than one way to skin a cat," she mused,
as she pinned its little feet to the dissection board.​
Anyway, write funny or enticing or absurd or sensuous first lines.

Second exercise: Write titles to go with those first lines. I came up with stuff like:

ROSES ARE RED, TOO - "What a lovely cock," she whispered, just before biting it off.
HOME ON THE RANGE - I'd been out here too long -- the sheep were looking enticing.
AN ACT OF CONGRESS - As the junior senator futilely plowed my ass with his pathetic little prick, I thought to myself, "The cloud-computing lobby is NOT paying me enough for this!"
BLACK MAGIC WOMAN - I knew I was in trouble when she threw my testicles into the stew pot.
STICK IT WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE - The dark side of Mercury is a bad place for an orgy.
HONKY TONK CHIMPANZEES - I knew I was doomed when Bertha blew me her simian kiss.
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED DAUGHTERS - How much did they need Daddy's love?
BLACK HOLE SUN - When the end of time came, I was enjoying great anal sex.
TEST CASE - Tis better to be Wasserman Positive than never to have loved at all.

Third exercise... well, you'll need to buy the book, eh? It's inexpensive.

These are really good.

It makes me think that it would be fun if this site sponsored an annual bad story contest (not that these are bad, but they are over the top), or even a bad opening sentence contest similar to the Bulwer-Lytton contest. Erotica is a great field for humorous writing.
 
I read stories here and like the situation but not the characters, or the characters are interesting but I don't like the premise they're used in. I'll remember a couple I saw just walking around wherever who look like they're mismatched and make up a story of how they met or what they do. Sometimes I'll see something that reminds me of a person or people I knew in the past and I make them more interesting in a story than they were in real life. Other times I think about a fantasy that has just never happened for me and make up how I wish it would go for once.
 
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