PostSecret: A Great Place for Creative Writing Ideas and Leads

Posted by Megan B. Wyatt Aug 30, 2009

Finding ideas for writing can either be inevitable or impossible, depending on how open and finely-tuned a writer's observational skills are.

I used to struggle to find ideas for fiction writing because I was looking for huge revelations and entire plots to just fall into my lap. While this might seem to happen to writers, it doesn't. It appears to happen as the result of the unconscious imagination turning over ideas and then finally revealing them to the conscious mind as a somewhat formed idea.

One of the greatest tools I have discovered as a human is PostSecret, a web blog devoted to sharing anonymous secrets mailed on postcards that reveal truths that are minute, horrifying, funny or terrifyingly serious. New secrets are posted each Sunday, and PostSecret has published several books of its secrets.

PostSecret became one of my greatest tools as a writer when I began questioning the people behind the postcards. What made a person do such a thing? Who is the person behind that repulsive, funny interesting secret? Could it be a psychotic murderer or my best friend?

I began developing characters based on a couple of sentences written on a postcard, and these have made for the most interesting characters and plots imaginable. Try developing an entire story based around characters from one set of PostSecret cards.

Take this secret found on this week's PostSecret for example:

"A carriage company pays me an obscene amount of money to avoid a PR nightmare. I take their animal corpses away in the middle of the night and bury them on their land."

What questions could develop from this? What is the company doing with the horses and why are they covering it up? What type of character would take such a job? Keep rolling with the questions and you'll find yourself writing pages of ideas and story.