Please do not ever feel concerned if you do not always have piles of story ideas in your head.  Not even once should we worry about this!  It is so common to feel a bit lost when we start a story.  For some elves, this occurs nearly every time.

Elf elders suggest a simple solution:
If you had a team of story elves standing in front of you, and they were at your service and devoted to making any story you wanted, what would you ask them for?

Would you request a story that featured a talking horse named Penelope?  A dwarf warrior who just earned his first ax?  Would the story be set in a cave or in a tree house?  Would you and your next-door neighbor, Adam, be the main characters?  Would you both be old and have beards?

What story would you wish to have handmade, and find lying on your pillow tonight?

Write down this Wish List.  Write down the characters, the setting and the main events that you would dearly love to see take place!  Just notes, mind you.  Nothing long or tiring to write out.   These notes don’t even have to be complete sentences.

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(“…” means write these things down before you read the rest of this tip.)

Now, with this superb story list complete, imagine yourself stepping over to the side of the elves.  Imagine yourself standing among those who have been given the ideas!  What could you do with them?  Could you start with one piece?

New idea:  We can always start a story by writing a creative Wish List of characters, events and story goings-on.  Then, once the list is done, we can consider ourselves just one of the writers.  We might find that the story comes easily to us because it contains characters and situations that we hand-picked—these are also likely things that we know something about!  Quite possibly, we will have made a list long enough to create two stories, and, in the end, we may want to include only some of the ideas in this story.

Never forget that YOU can write exactly the story you would most like to read!  Keep imagining bustling elves around you as part of the writing team…