How can I get inspired to write a story, without any experience beforehand?

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If you don't have an idea for a story, you can retell an existing one. There are a few ways to do this. One is to take a song that tells a story (a lot of folk songs and ballads are small stories) and rewrite it as a short story. Obviously this will require you to flesh the story out with additional detail and atmosphere, all of which is good practice.

You can also retell a folktale or myth. You can do this in various ways:

a straight retelling
retelling an adult tale for children
retelling a children's tale for adults
changing the setting or time period
changing the ending from comic to tragic or tragic to comic

I wrote a number of stories based on the Child Ballads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads) that ended up getting published. The best of them, a work I am still proud of, was a retelling in the modern day that changed the ending from comic to tragic.

In the end, there are no new stories. We are all just retelling the old tales to suit new tastes. (Nice, because it means we will never run out of stuff to write.) The art and the artifice are all in the telling. So there is no shame in looking to old tellings for inspiration for new tellings. After all, it worked for Shakespeare.

Obviously, don't do anything that infringes anyone's copyrights. And remember, the art is in the telling. You are borrowing old bones, but you are giving them new flesh, and the new flesh should be all yours.

posted almost 8 years ago

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