I make a lot of lists on this website. I think it’s a great way to come up with ideas that you wouldn’t normally be able to produce. Even your discarded ideas may be an inspiration to someone else.

Begin Wherever

When you sit down to try to write or design something, you don’t have to begin at the beginning. Write down whatever comes to mind: outline, notes, people, places, general ideas, tone…. It’s most important to get down whatever your initial thoughts were when you decided to create. Your introduction can come later, after you’ve set down your initial creative thoughts and had a moment to reflect on how to introduce it to your audience.

And never over-introduce; the title (of a blog post or video or whatever) should be nearly enough. If you write a bloated intro to get your thoughts together on the subject, pare it way back to its essence before you publish.

Lists

One way to access that creativity is to create a list. Start the list with the first few things that come into your head–the obvious, the overdone, etc.–to get them out of your system. Then decide how long the list is going to be. If it’s a complex concept, you may only be able to come up with 5 or 12. If it’s a pretty simple concept, and you need several examples for one work, you may be able to come up with 50 or even 100.

Your Friend, Categories

The way to come up with a lot of examples is to break the list down into categories. The categories should be roughly equally broad and deep. Then, you can start filling in some here and there. You can let them sit for awhile and come back later. You can move some around as you realize that this one or that one fits better in another category that needs more filling out anyway.

If you want to come up with interesting characters for a mystery, for example, start by listing the first several that come to mind. As you do, think a little about the categories they might fall into. Maybe your categories will be by occupation, maybe by age, maybe by “type” (brooding, aggressive, bookish, etc.), maybe by nationality or ethnicity–whatever seems useful to your purposes. Stretch yourself a little on coming up with categories; it should be a little difficult to come up with that last one.

Then separate the ones you’ve already listed into the appropriate categories and begin filling out the categories more. You now have a good start: the categories and a few entries with a bunch of placeholders. You no longer face a blank page.

Filling out the Categories

What I find as I fill out my lists is that I have to stretch a bit more here and there, and I begin thinking outside the box. I go beyond the obvious, top-of-the-head ideas and delve deeper into the concepts. I search the Web for images, references, definitions, or synonyms that will uncover some niche I hadn’t thought of before. “Returning war veterans! Of course! They have weapons, training, and discipline. I can think of five returning war veteran characters easily.” You may come up with four soldiers and officers and then, stretching a bit, hit upon a female nurse who harbors a grudge against an officer for ordering the charge that killed her sweetheart. Suddenly, you have the inspiration for a juicy murder mystery. Did she do it herself? Did another soldier who was infatuated with her get revenge on her behalf?

Now you don’t have to settle for your first idea. If you come up with 10 or 20, you’re bound to find one you like better than your first concept. Give yourself those choices. You may even find that there are two or three you like so well that you can now create two or three different works.

If you’re writing murder mysteries, for example, you’re going to need plenty of methods of murder, plenty of motives, and plenty of means of covering up the evidence. Making lists of these allows you to produce particularly good ones and then mix and match elements from different lists to produce a story, like drawing a suspect, murder weapon, and location for a game of Clue.

If you’re creating dragon game adventures, you’re going to need plenty of locations to explore, baddies to fill that location, and motivations for the heroes to take on the adventure. For that last one, you may think “the heroes want treasure; isn’t that enough?” See the trap you’ve fallen into? You’ve accepted the first, most obvious, trope as if it should be the motivation for every adventure. If you create a list of motivations, pretty soon you’ll come up with some juicy ones that will add spice to your campaign.

1. They want treasure, obviously.
2. They want a key or map that will help them get a greater treasure.
3. They want to return a lost artifact to its rightful owner to get a high priest to remove a curse.
4. They want to capture a monster to trade it to a faction for a magic item.
5. They want to help a faction (or just the townsfolk of a town) they like.
6. They want to avenge a slain NPC ally who died protecting them.
7. They need to gain the admiration of the local lord to be offered a knighthood.
8. They want to accomplish something for a faction so that faction will ally with their faction against an enemy faction.
9. They want to stop an enemy faction from getting something that will make them a stronger enemy but which is useless to the heroes themselves.
10. They want to achieve something that will gain them fame and favor with the king, which could lead to unknown future benefits.

Some of those will require you to first generate that need or desire in the players, but that will stoke the fire of narrative running thru your campaign.