Sources of Story Ideas

[LegendInMyOwnMind]

Authors, what are some of the sources of inspiration for your stories?

A porn video inspired My Crazy Sisters, an incest threesome story.

The inspiration for The Only Man She Can Trust grew out of my well-known distaste for the step convention in porn videos. But as I thought about it, I realized that a stepsibling story where it isn't incest but feels like it could go in interesting directions.

My current WiP, The Melody in my Heart, is inspired by meditating on a picture in the Thick Thighs Saves Lives thread in Fetish & Sexuality Central. I looked at her luscious curves for a good while and asked myself questions. What's her name? What's her personality? ... You'll need to read it to find out more, but her name is Melody, and the fact that this would be a romance gave me a title.

Am I crazy compared to all you other authors?

 

[old_prof]

Most things start from a glimpse of a single scene. That single scene was the genesis for my original story (my shortest one published to date). Those characters then took over and have become 23 stories (and still growing).

Sometimes the scene is sexual, like for that first story, or the lumberjack story. But sometimes that scene is just a what if.

What if two strangers got locked in a vault?
What if when I had fallen on the ice and gotten a bad concussion, I had gained mind reading in the deal?
What if you tried to teach sex robots to pay attention to each other to give the customer better three-comes?
What if a magical place could give you not only your ultimate fantasy, but the one you really needed?
What would happen if a wallflower bookseller fell for a glamorous woman?
What if two opposites are stranded in a snow storm together?
What if a magical chair could turn cheating women into stone?

I have only vague ideas for any of those. The first one was definitely triggered because I had a friend open a shop in an old bank that still had the vault in it.
The bookseller started with just her character and everything else expanded from that.

Some bunnies still in my head come from people I observe in restaurants or around town. I watch people a lot.

My Nude Day story, the best story I've written yet, just popped into my head almost fully formed as I lay waking up one morning.

So I either create some characters and put them in a situation (like the bookseller) or I imagine a scenario and create characters to be in it (my original story or the vault one). Once I have one or two characters and a scenario, the rest just builds out from that.

 

[IWroteThis]

Most of my story ideas come to me as I'm laying in bed at night, trying to sleep. My brain is like, "If you go to sleep, you'll forget it. Better get back up." It also happens in the morning when I'm trying to sleep in.

 

[JMJ4Play]

I get 2-3 story ideas a day and am so gunshy to share my stories. But they are dear to me

 

[Erozetta]

For the most part, my ideas are the result of dreams and daydreams.

The only one that has an actual "inspiration" that went with it is The Magician's Doll. That setup and story was inspired by this scene:

But I set it on the Blue Line in Boston.

 

[NuclearFairy]

My mind is a crazy twisted landscape.

Most of my story ideas just come to me in dreams. But sometimes something sparks them.

Like when @ShelbyDawn57 was talking to me about eldrich abominations, and in particular the flaming skull god. Then my mind went, "I can make a porn out of that! Well, not that specifically, but yeah flaming skeleton let's get it on!"

Or when I was reading a transmigration smut manga, about a girl who found herself as a female orc in a world with only male orcs. And my reaction was, "What no! Don't go with the overly pretty knight! Go back to the orc men, they're 10 times sexier!"

The stories I get inspired to write have very little in common with their source material to be honest. Unless it's something that came to me in a dream, they rarely do.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Mostly my work starts with a character or two and imagining how they'd interact.

 

[FrancesScott]

Stangely a few of these come fron my local public pool.

 

[ronde]

My story ideas come from anywhere and everywhere. Some are memories from my past, some are news articles, some are books I've read or movies I've watched. I enjoy watching people as well, and then theorizing their personalities and what they might become involved in based upon their looks, actions, and speech.

I've used these examples before but:

That girl from high school who couldn't buy a date.
That guy from high school who played every sport and now works changing oil in cars at WalMart.
The fortyish woman at the mall wearing a tight T-shirt that says, "Magically Delicious" over her breasts.
Any movie or book about war. There are a million stories just waiting to be written about the soldiers and their wives, girlfriends, mothers and fathers. You just have to put yourself in their shoes and imagine how they would view the world and how those views would cause them to act in certain ways.
Do some selective carving up of people you know and construct characters based upon those pieces.
What if (insert the opposite of something that happened). How would two or more characters react to the new situation.

 

[HyunnaPark]

I get mine from a guy who sells them out of a briefcase on Canal street, in between the fake handbag guy and the halal food truck.

 

[Z_TheWriter]

My one published story is literally just a re-imagining of a real thing which happened to me.

I have 2 WIP. One started as two random lines of dialogue neither of which are in the story anymore. The other came from finding something I wrote ages ago in an old folder on an external drive.

I have ideas saved from dreams, from songs, books, artwork, comics, from walking past someone on the street and going "what if that person was ___ instead?" And quite a few where I couldn't tell you at all.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'll second "anywhere and everywhere." All over the place. My weirdest inspiration was a story that MelissaBaby pointed out in a thread about a type of marine worm that looks like a penis and washed up on a beach in California.

Many of my inspirations come from other stories. I'll take the kernel of an idea of another story and make my own story out of it.

Various exhibitionist fantasies I've nursed over time. Experiences with photography. All kinds of things.

 

[CalBishForNow]

My two series are about established couples with various personal kinks, and variations on those kinks and complications and added drama and how they play out in as-realistic-as-I-can-make-it-and-still-find-it-hot scenarios.

I've got three stories that started out as generic, clichéd Halloween premises (costume swap at a Halloween party, boy goes to Halloween party and it turns out that the woman disguised as a vampire really is one, the host of a Halloween party really is a witch with a magic brew in the punch), and adding details and twists to them until I had a story. I really should put some time and thought into another holiday at some point. Unfortunately Christmas seems like the next most obvious and that contest season isn't a good time for writing here for me.

I've got one story from a discussion on this forum about the expectations/conventions of a certain category here.

That covers everything I've published here. Looking at the stories I've started but not finished and the file I'm keeping of ideas I'm interested in, I've got a few from the Story Ideas forum and a few general personal fantasies.

 

[StillStunned]

Most of my story ideas come from a word, a phrase, an image, a thought. Then the story forms itself around it like an oyster making a pearl around a grain of sand.

Or something less poetic.

Here's how my newest story came about: Muffin (750 words, Non-Erotic).

On my way home from town the other day I decided to stop by a baker's and buy myself a muffin. Just the one, because my wife is away visiting family. So buying just the one took conscious effort, and it reminded me of a sonnet by Tony Harrison ("Long Distance, II", from The School of Eloquence):

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot-water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name,
and the disconnected number I still call.



I first read that sonnet more than thirty years ago, but it's stuck with me. It comes to mind every time I'm scrolling through the contacts on my phone and I see the names of people who died years ago, but whose numbers I still carry over every time I get a new phone.

"Muffin" is about dealing with the unseen presence of an absent loved one, inspired by something as simple as buying a muffin on my way home from town.

 

[crookedletter]

My brain's like a popcorn popper. Shit's always flying around from who knows where. Most of it's nonsense. But every now and then I get one that I want to hold onto for a minute, give it a good look. And sometimes that makes me want to start writing.

 

[PadTy]

Most of my story ideas come from a word, a phrase, an image, a thought. Then the story forms itself around it like an oyster making a pearl around a grain of sand.

Or something less poetic.

Here's how my newest story came about: Muffin (750 words, Non-Erotic).

On my way home from town the other day I decided to stop by a baker's and buy myself a muffin. Just the one, because my wife is away visiting family. So buying just the one took conscious effort, and it reminded me of a sonnet by Tony Harrison ("Long Distance, II", from The School of Eloquence):

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot-water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name,
and the disconnected number I still call.



I first read that sonnet more than thirty years ago, but it's stuck with me. It comes to mind every time I'm scrolling through the contacts on my phone and I see the names of people who died years ago, but whose numbers I still carry over every time I get a new phone.

"Muffin" is about dealing with the unseen presence of an absent loved one, inspired by something as simple as buying a muffin on my way home from town.

Just last night I began clearing old contacts from my phone, but couldn't bring myself to delete my grandfather's phone number. He's been gone for years. It's senseless and perfectly human.

 

[GemmaGemmaGemma]

Story ideas can come from absolutely anywhere. I develop and plan a lot of ideas on my morning walks, but the original inspiration can come from all over the place. I've had ideas from people watching, porn, doujins & comics, other lit stories, tiktok! I came back to literotica after a long break because of a tiktok I saw and my mind thought, well what if this was porn instead. I didn't even end up writing it but I'm glad it got me back into writing.

 

[ChuckWolf]

My first story, Nudist Retreat Humiliation came from thinking about what is the etiquette for physical contact at a nude resort and how you handle a situation with someone who is very flirty and touchy-feely and insists on giving you a hug and what happens if all this touching leads to getting a noticeable hard-on that you can't conceal or easily get rid of in a crowded and public place and dealing with the embarrassment of all of this.