• Every good book starts with a great idea.library books image by Daughterson from Fotolia.com
  
  You want to write a fiction book, but you have no idea how to go about it or what to write about. The good news is when you start to write, the ideas will start to flow. But where do you start right now? Fortunately, there are dozens of great ways to jump-start your writing with ideas.
  
  

Your Life

• Start looking for ideas in the nearest possible location: your own memories. In some cases, your dramatic stories will write themselves. An experience in Afghanistan, medical school training or a beautiful love story all provide the core of great stories. Sometimes, the drama in your life is not so obvious. Long-simmering family tensions, dealing with childhood bullies or just growing up in the suburbs can all lend themselves to good tales.
  
  Remember, though, that you aren't writing a memoir. Change the stories. Base them on your own experiences, but make the characters more interesting, the bad guys worse, the heroes more heroic. If you love science fiction, set your story in space; if you love romance, use your memories as the starting point for a love story.
  
  

Your Family History

• If you don't know of any fascinating stories in your own family, start talking to your parents, your grandparents, and aunts and uncles. While not everyone will dig up tales of nearly dying on the Titanic or in a concentration camp, most people will find stories about growing up in the Depression or during the Civil Rights Movement.
  
  As in stories from your own life, feel free to change things around. Your book is a work of fiction, and stories your family tell you can be the core of a fantastic fictional story.
  
  

Fairy Tales

• Everyone reads fairy tales, and inside fairy tales you find most of the classic plots: love stories, bad guys beaten by brave little guys, stories of children lost in the woods and of beasts tamed by beauty.
  
  Use these plots as the cores of your own novels. Beauty and the Beast could be converted into the central characters of a hard-boiled detective novel or the protagonist and antagonist of a spy thriller. Cinderella stories are found in romantic fiction and in sports movies. A serial killer in a horror novel could play out Disney fairy tales one at a time: Snow White's heart, Cinderella's foot and so on. Play with the stories, thinking about how your favorite fairy tales would transform if told within your favorite genre, and use the ideas this generates.
  
  

Read the Newspaper

• Read your daily newspaper, front to back, for ideas. The television series "Law and Order" is notorious for taking crime stories from the news and transforming them, thinly disguised, into episodes that then play out in court.
  
  While you should not be so blatant, you can tell some great stories using the news as your core. For instance, you may find a child abduction story. Most end tragically. But what if the child in your story was abducted to put pressure on his scientist parents by a terrorist organization? What if he was stolen by fairies or aliens? What if she ran away from her happy, well-adjusted home to start a career in Hollywood? Filling in the blanks around most news stories with your own ideas is often enough to create compelling fiction books.
  
  

Read Other Novels

• Reading books in your chosen genre, both classic works and modern blockbusters, is a sure way of teaching your brain to generate its own ideas for fiction novels. Don't limit yourself to the bookstore; use the online libraries found at Project Gutenberg and Google Books to read the older out-of-copyright books that have ideas whose times may have come around again.