Randomly picking one of Georges Polti's dramatic situations (check the search engines and you'll find a lot of information on this)
Randomly opening the dictionary (yes, an actual hard copy dictionary. Will be useful in case of an apocalypse, if we can still read)
Randomly opening the yellow pages (yes, we still have a few of those, too)
Pulling books from my shelf and randomly opening them
Let me explain a little more about the last one, in case I give the impression that I am plagiarizing. I am distinctly not using anything about the core of the story or any specific parts thereof. What happens here is that I open a book, and I'll use one of my Sherlock Holmes mystery collections.
I randomly picked "The Adventure of the Empty House," and I read a line about Holmes checking for anyone following him.
That gives me the idea of someone walking home, with the dread of being followed. Now, I can take it the typical route of horror or drama or I can give it a comic twist. I don't try to play too long with something that doesn't interest me at all, but I try not to go through too many rounds before trying to work am idea up. Then it stops becoming random.
To continue with the last tip, if something I read is interesting but I can't necessarily find a conflict in it, instead of discarding it altogether, I do a second random opening. Same book, but this time I get "The Greek Interpreter" and a line about giggling in a venomous way. I love it, because now I have the idea of someone being stalked through the darkness, followed by a creepy giggler.
And of course, now comes the barrage of questions, letting me know I've got something intriguing: Why is he giggling? Why is he following this particular person? Where is the 'victim' going?
Those are only a few of the tools I use and I certainly don't use them for entire novel or novella story arcs, but for individual scenes or the very short fiction I've been writing lately, these work just fine.
Here's to your own bucket filling quickly.
For those ready for my first attempts at self-publishing Melange should be available by the middle of next month, barring any major catastrophes.
After some thought and experimentation, I discovered this essentially works on Kindle too (I don't have Nook to test it there), but if you open a book and randomly slide the marker ball thingie, you get essentially the same result. Just don't do it to a book you haven't read unless you like spoilers.
