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Like many freelancers, you probably made a goal to sell more stories in 2011, and one key element to meeting this goal is having stories to tell. And like many freelancers right about now, you’re probably scratching your head wondering how the heck to find these stories. Maybe everything you’re coming up with feels tired and old … done to death. Boring and uninteresting. Or worst of all, you’re coming up with nothing. Zip. Zilch. And if you keep going at this rate, that’s exactly what you’ll have in your checking account come March or April.

Last year I gave a talk to freelancers called “Five Tips to Finding Story Ideas That Sell” and it seemed to strike a chord with them. Here are the tips in a nutshell. If you’d like to work one-on-one with me to learn how to generate story ideas effortlessly — ideas that actually sell to editors – sign up for my Become an Idea Machine workshop that starts on January 17, 2011 (that’s next week!) Some of my students have gone on to sell stories they developed in my class to places like the New York Times, Discover, Yankee, Parenting, The New Scientist, and more.

1. Memorize the phrase “That would make a great story.” Whenever I’m talking to my friends, mother, kid’s pediatrician, or a person buying bread ahead of me in line, chances are good I’m weighing the conversation in my mind and wondering if there’s some kind of story I could sell to an editor. It’s sick, I know! If my friend is poring her heart out to me about her cheating under-employed husband who just cleaned out her checking account, of course I’m there to comfort her and give her advice as a friend, but the writer in me is thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe my smart, well-educated friend ended up with such a loser. This is the third time this week I’ve heard about smart women ending up with dud husbands. I wonder if a women’s magazine would be interested in a piece about smart women marrying down. Is this a trend?” I’ll be frank: much of the time, the ideas I come up with this way I don’t use, because they’d violate a confidence or just aren’t that interesting to me. The real takeaway here is that I’ve trained myself to be present as a writer (not just a friend/mother/stranger in the supermarket/etc.) during the day — it’s a skill you can develop, too.

2. Focus on what what will be hot a year from now. Right now, there are a lot of freelancers pitching stories about frugality and simple living. But I think forward-thinking writers have moved post-recession and and pitching stories that are a step-ahead of the crowd. No, I’m not suggesting pieces on how to buy a share on a corporate jet or how to live large like Richard Branson — those days are gone. For example, we’ve been reading stories about “staycations” and cheap domestic travel, but I think international travel is coming back; if you write about travel, now might be the time to start looking for stories over the border. As a food writer, I would have been laughed at for pitching a story on caviar two years ago, but right now, it might be a good topic. I could do a little digging and find out that maybe caviar consumption is up around the world. Are caviar producers feeling optimistic again? Is this some kind of economic indicator we should pay attention to? Right now there are “happiness” and “simplicity”  trends in literature; before this we were looking

I've been on a bit of a reading binge. Summer does that to me. Warm sun, lounge chairs, a tall glass of iced tea...it's the perfect setting to kick back and read.

The funny thing is, I woke up at 2 a.m. the other day with the opening of a story in my head. It wasn't like anything I had read. It wasn't like anything else I had written. But the voice was fully formed and it wouldn't go away. I finally had to get up and type out the first four pages or risk not sleeping the rest of the night.

Since then I've been turning it over in my mind, trying to figure out the rest of the story, where the character goes from here. Even as I try to work on other things, this story keeps interrupting.

Have you ever had a character show up in your brain and demand that their story be told?

I was talking with a writer friend who was freaking out over a recent sale she saw on one of the publishing trade websites.

“That’s MY story!” she wailed. “I should just stop writing my novel now because this other writer has just sold MY book!”

After talking her off the ledge, I tried to reassure my friend that just because another writer has written a book with a similar idea doesn’t mean that it’s the same story.

No matter how hard we try, there are no new ideas/stories under the sun.

As a writer, you come to the table with a unique voice. Something that only you possess in the whole Universe. With this voice, you can take an idea and make it your own. And that’s why writers can write a book on the same idea and create different stories. A story is created by the writer and not the idea.

It is disheartening when your story idea is getting buzz in the bookstores or deal announcements and you’re not ready to submit. How can you be sure that when you finish your book that you will even have an audience? That your book idea is now stale?

This is something to ponder and sometimes timing can be a friend or an enemy, but I also believe that good stories will always find a home.

Write the story you love. Don’t chase trends. Readers want a story written with your unique voice. An idea as old as time can be converted into something new and fresh by a writer who wants to her story.

I told my friend to keep writing her book.

A weekly column from children’s author Simon Rose

NOTE: For the month of February, Simon Rose will focus on where ideas come from and how writers turn them into stories.

As a writer, I often find myself wondering “what if.” This in itself can lead to many story ideas, some of which may end up being more developed than others.

What if there were a letter in your mailbox, inviting you to attend a school for wizards?

Or if one night a flying boy dressed in green appeared at your window with an invitation to accompany him to a magical realm?

Or you discovered another universe at the back of your closet?

Or followed a white rabbit down a hole into another dimension?

This might not have been how the famous stories of Harry Potter, Peter Pan, The Chronicles of Narnia or Alice in Wonderland actually came about, but these “what ifs” demonstrate how the writer’s mind can work simply from the starting point of “what if”?

Ideas can, of course, also be generated from your own influences, either from childhood or things from later in life. I became immersed in science fiction as a boy. The original Star Trek series springs readily to mind, along with other TV shows of the time, and I also read a lot of science fiction novels and collections of short stories, as well fantasy writers. I also read a tremendous number of comic books as a child. Pure escapism perhaps, but comic books were great for the imagination. I leapt headfirst into those tales of superheroes in what was probably the golden age of comic books in the 1960’s. The stories took me across the universe, into strange dimensions, into the land of the Norse gods or had me swinging from the New York rooftops.

At high school, I studied a great deal of history, retaining my interest in the subject up to the present day and historical events and personalities have certainly served as an inspiration for some of my novels for children. Sometimes I have used real stories and characters, as in The Sorcerer’s Letterbox, which is based on the true story of Richard III and the Princes in the Tower of London, or sometimes just utilized the setting of medieval England at the time of the Black Death, as in The Heretic’s Tomb. In The Alchemist’s Portrait, Matthew’s time travel adventures take him Amsterdam in 1666, the French Revolution, the American Civil War and the Russian Revolution. My upcoming novel, The Doomsday Mask, features the legend of the lost city of Atlantis, mysterious artifacts from ancient civilizations, the Pleistocene Extinction and the chaos of Berlin in 1945.

Creating Ideas for Children's Books by Robyn Opie Ideas are everywhere. All of the time. It's our job, as authors writing for children, to find some ideas and turn them into entertaining stories. The most common sources of inspiration include: our experiences and personalities, children, family, pets, friends, conversations, television, newspapers, books etc. I've never had any trouble finding