Generating book ideas through research – A brief introduction

By Dennis Mellersh

One of the key aspects of answering the question “How am I going to begin to write this book that I have been thinking about?” is to start with an effective approach or technique for generating ideas.

You may have a vague concept in your mind about what your book will be about, but at this point you may be struggling with find a way to come up with concrete ideas for specific practical content (if it is a non-fiction book) or ideas for characters, a plot, setting for the action and other factors if you are thinking about writing a novel.

Few of us, unless we have had an extraordinarily eventful life, such as being a gold prospector in the jungles of South America, could write a book based solely on our life experiences, or a book related to knowledge we have built up based on our career.

The novelist Charles Dickens, author of A Christmas Carol, had vast experience with an extensive number of different types of people, businesses, infrastructure, and social trends in England, and in particular London, so he could develop ideas based on this knowledge and thereby write his novels chiefly from his life experience.

But for you and me, we would likely need to augment our life experiences with some solid research, even on subjects we are already familiar with.

And fortunately, for the book author of today, the Internet and contemporary e-materials make the job of research somewhat easier than it was for writers of books in throughout history.

This does not mean that the Internet alone can likely be a sole source of researched information for your planned book, but it can furnish a lot of material, including being an excellent source of guidance on books and other materials that you can research through your local library, and other traditional sources.

In doing our book research, we also have to organize it. As Rudolf Flesch, however, observes in his book, The Art of Clear Thinking*, “…reading books, magazines and newspapers is only half the job. The other half is using all this material in place of that wretched memory of ours. This means note-taking, and filing. How you do it is up to you; pick your own system. But note-taking and filing there has to be; practically all the world’s ideas have come out of notes and files.”

*Rudolf Flesch, The Art of Clear Thinking, Collier Books, New York, 1962, 1966.