3 Totally Unexpected Places to Grab Ideas

Your kitchen, your closet, and your medicine cabinet

A lot of writers talk about needing ideas or finding things to write about.

My problem is just the opposite. I have ideas all the time. They are constantly bombarding my brain, overwhelming me with the weird and wacky. Not all of them are workable ideas, but so many thoughts attack me that I worry my life won’t be nearly long enough to scratch the surface of my backlog. Hundreds of times each day I read something, hear something, or see something that makes me say, “I wonder if …”

My brain might be wired differently than other peoples, but I find interesting connections all the time in the most unexpected places.

Are you home, stumped and frustrated? Beating your head against the desk trying to think of some new angle or interesting idea? Try this.

Walk into your kitchen

1. What was the last meal you had there? Who was with you? How were you feeling? Did you cook? What did you eat?
2. Do you like the decor? Is it updated or outdated? What color is it? Is the appearance of the kitchen your choice or someone else’s? What would your ideal kitchen look like?
3. Inventory your dishes, your pots and pans, your glassware. What do they say about you? Where did you get them? Are they coordinated or a mismatched set?
4. Rate the organization of your kitchen on a scale of 1–10. What does this say about your personality? Rate the cleanliness.
5. Open your refrigerator. What’s in there? Do you have fresh produce? Stale bread? Goo on the shelves or pristine plastic slide-outs? What’s the monetary value of the food in your refrigerator?

If you’re wondering how those questions might give you ideas, check out how this faucet flows once it gets turned on.

Nonfiction ideas from the kitchen:

• The loss of the family dinner.
• Why people always congregate in the kitchen.
• The cost of kitchen remodels.
• How did your grandmother/mother/grandfather/father affect your eating or cooking habits?
• How much money does an American family spend on groceries? How does that compare to the rest of the world?
• Why are so many Americans obese?
• How much does a person spend on dishes, glassware, and/or cooking utensils throughout their lifetime?
• The best parties on the cheapest budget.
• What cooking together in the kitchen can do for couples.
• The importance of teaching kids to cook.

Fiction ideas from the kitchen

• imaginative places to hide a stash.
• possible weapons in the kitchen.
• sinister cooking plots.
• a marriage that falls apart because neither one can cook.
• writing a cookbook that’s based on magical, illegal, or ill-begotten ingredients.
• the story of the worker who picked the avocados sitting on the counter.
• the goblin in the ‘frig that causes food to go moldy.
• the relationship between a man who’s a flash-in-the-pan and a woman who’s a slow cooker.
• a food-assassin for hire.

You get the idea. One thought leads to another, and soon your notebook page is filled with possibilities.

Open up your closet

1. What is your go-to outfit? Which one piece of clothing most reflects your personality? What is your color preference? How would you describe your style?
2. How do you store your shoes? How many pairs do you have? Are they serviceable or fashionable or both? What’s your favorite pair and what do they say about you?
3. What’s the softest thing in your closet? What is the roughest textured garment you have? Do you have silk? Fur? Leather? Wool? If you had to pick out the item that is the most comfortable against your skin, what would it be?
4. Do you have any emotional connections to a garment? What memories are associated with that little black dress or the tweed suit jacket? Does how you dress affect how you feel? Does your signature scent linger on your clothes?
5. How is your closet organized? Stuffed or orderly? Matching hangers or anything goes? Folded, stashed, on the floor in piles? If you could go back to the time you bought each item, would you re-purchase it?

Fold and stack all the ideas you’re getting in nice, neat piles to try on in the future:

The new trends in rental clothing, how clothing affects our emotions, a story about a hand-me-down sweater, the garment industry, a novel about a designer with big ideas but who gets stuck “designing” average clothes for a big-box store, tactile textiles, the flashy dresser who is abysmally shy, the move toward re-purposing. Last year, I wrote and published an essay titled, “My Mother’s Closet” about how painful it was for my sisters and me to sort through my fashionista-mother’s closet after she died.

So many ideas come out of the closet. You just have to step in to investigate them.

Peek into your medicine cabinet

1. Have you ever snooped into someone else’s medicine cabinet? Why? What did you learn? How’d you feel afterward? Did seeing what you saw affect how you felt about the other person?
2. Is there anything in your medicine cabinet that you’re ashamed of? What’s your most necessary-item in your medicine cabinet? Do you have anything of anyone else’s in there? What’s in there that you NEVER use? What do you use most? Duplicate items? What do you always run out of?
3. Check the expiration dates. List what ailments the items in the cabinet are intended to cure. When was the last time you were sick? Do you have any pricy prescriptions in there? Any old-time remedies? What’s the last item you bought?
4. Make a list of the things that the items in your medicine cabinet CAN’T cure. How many of those have you suffered from? How did you finally get over it? Does a bandaid have any other use than to cover a scratch?
5. Is your medicine cabinet a medicine cabinet, or are you cross-training it as a cosmetic container? Wrinkle cream? Tubes of mascara? Is toothpaste a medicine or a beauty product?

Do ideas come out of a medicine cabinet in a drug-induced state? Hmmm.

Of course, the opioid crisis is an idea that might skulk out of the medicine cabinet, but there’s so much more. What about the amount of money that we spend trying to cure ourselves because we can’t afford insurance? Are there still “snake-oil” treatments out there being sold? What about the story of a woman who is beautiful when you see her in public, but who is downright UGLY without her make-up? Whatever happened to Merthiolate? Do the products in the medicine cabinet hook-up at night and get drunk? Do they distill new drugs behind the mirror? What’s the financial status of major drugstores in America? Why are pharmaceuticals so much cheaper in other countries? What about a story of a poor old woman who goes around peddling cough syrup as a cure-all?

Let your brain ramble

Did your writing teachers tell you not to censor yourself when you’re getting started? (If not, they should have!) You have to write, just write without worry, before you can edit and organize your words into a logical sequence.

The same principle applies to getting creative ideas. Instead of thinking logically about each idea, just write them all down. Get as many as possible. Don’t be afraid. Don’t shy away from weird associations. Look everywhere. Explore strange connections between contrasting ideas. Play fast and loose with your thoughts. Don’t hold yourself accountable. Don’t worry. Be happy.

As John Steinbeck said,

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, and pretty soon, you have a dozen…

And they’ll be proliferating in the most unexpected places.

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