The Art of Ideation: Finding & Capturing Fleeting Story Ideas with Notion
For writers, the struggle is real. Ideas are the fleeting glimpses of magnificent butterflies flitting from flower to flower as we stumble around with a net like Spongebob in the Jellyfishing fields.
As a writer, you know the struggle: ideas never show up when you need them. Instead, they strike at 3 AM, mid-shower, or during a completely unrelated work meeting when you’re supposed to be paying attention. The worst part? If you don’t capture them immediately, they vanish into the void—lost forever like a brilliant dream you can’t quite remember.
That’s where tools like Notion come in. Whether you’re at your desk or on the go, Notion helps you seamlessly capture and organise ideas before they disappear. In this guide, we’ll dive into:
• How to generate more ideas.
• How to capture fleeting thoughts before they slip away.
• How to set up Notion (on both desktop and mobile) to store and develop your ideas effortlessly.
Step 1: Generating Ideas
Also known as “plucking random thoughts out of the ether and mashing them together in new and interesting ways”
1. Be an Idea Magnet
Good ideas don’t just appear; they come from paying attention. The best storytellers are also the best observers—constantly noticing, questioning, and remixing the world around them.
Ask yourself:
• What if…? (What if time travel only worked on Sundays?)
• What’s the weirdest thing I saw today?
• What’s a problem no one has solved yet?
• What’s a memory that still sticks with me?
• What’s something I wish more stories explored?
🎭 Exercise: Set a 5-minute timer and write down five random ideas. They don’t have to be good—just capture whatever comes to mind.
If you get totally stuck you can always reach out to your favourite generative language model and ask it some questions. Start with…
What if…?
as a prompt, or if you prefer…
Give me a list of ten random concepts that I can put together as starters for a fiction writing ideation session.
Remember the name of the game here is Play, there are no rules. If you find a thread that you like, feel free to pull on it. If not, leave it alone and find another one.
2. The Unexpected Idea Goldmines
• Conversations: Ever overheard a snippet of dialogue that belongs in a book? (“Listen, Brad, if you’re going to fake your own death, at least tell me first.” - overhead in a train station in Salisbury, actually that’s a lie, but how cool would it be if it wasn’t)
• Weird History & Science Facts: Truth is often stranger than fiction.
• Random Word Generators: Smash unrelated concepts together (Cyberpunk + Haunted House = Neon Gothic Horror).
• Dreams & Half-Asleep Thoughts: They might be nonsense, or they might be pure gold.
Step 2: Capturing Fleeting Ideas Before They Escape
✍️ “The faintest ink is better than the best memory.”
Ideas are flighty creatures. If you don’t trap them the moment they appear, they’re gone. For me Notion is the ideal idea net, letting you jot down quick thoughts before they vanish.
1. Desktop Notion: Your Writing HQ
Set up a “Story Idea Bank” database:
• 📌 Title: A quick, memorable name for the idea.
• 🏷 Type: Character, Scene, Plot, Setting, World-Building, Title, Random Thought
• 🎭 Genre Tags: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Mystery, etc.
• 🚦 Status: New, Developing, Ready to Use
• 📖 Notes: A place to expand on the idea.
🛠 How to set it up:
1. Create a new database in Notion (Table view works best).
2. Add properties for Title, Type, Tags, Status, and Notes.
3. Optional: Set up filtered views (e.g., only show “Ready to Use” ideas).
Note : Notion doesn’t yet have a simple and easy way to pick a record at random and surface it for you. There are some convoluted ways that involve page id’s and various hack’s but that’s out of scope for what we’re trying to do here. If and when a simple methods does become available I’ll update this post with a link to a step by step tutorial.
Now you might not always be at your computer when inspiration strikes. For those instances a notebook also works but do you always have one (and a pen / sharp pencil) to hand? We’ll see in a minute how having the Notion mobile app on your phone can provide a respectable alternative.
2. Capturing Ideas on Mobile (Because Ideas Love to Hit When You’re Busy)
Your phone is your best tool for grabbing ideas on the go. And the best part is the seamless link between all your devices so that anything you enter on your phone will be ready and waiting for you when you get back to your desk.
🔹 Method 1: Notion Quick Capture Widget (iOS & Android)
• Open Notion, go to Settings > Widgets
• Add a quick add shortcut to instantly jot down ideas without opening the app.
🔹 Method 2: Voice-to-Text (For When You Can’t Type)
• Use Notion’s audio recording feature or voice dictation.
• Later, transcribe it into your Notion Idea Bank.
🔹 Method 3: Quick Notes in Notion
• Create a “Scratchpad” page where you can dump raw, unfiltered thoughts before sorting them later.
🛠 How to Set It Up on Mobile:
1. Open Notion > Create a new page titled “Quick Ideas.”
2. Add a button (via a template) that lets you create a new entry instantly.
3. Use the Quick Capture widget for 1-tap access.
Step 3: Organising & Developing Ideas
“An idea you capture today might become your best story in five years.”
The key to generating ideas is to create a daily practice around idea generation. It’s important to note that during the generation phase you’re just recording not filtering. The key to developing ideas is to devote some time on a regular basis to review your latest content and see how different elements can be expanded or combined.
1. Weekly Review: Revisit & Expand Your Ideas
Every week, set aside 15 minutes to:
✅ Sort ideas into categories (Characters, Plots, Settings, etc.).
✅ Flesh out the most promising ones.
✅ Mark outdated ideas for deletion.
2. Connecting the Dots: Combining Ideas
Sometimes, a single idea isn’t enough—but two combined can be magic.
Example:
1️⃣ Idea 1: A detective can only solve crimes after they’ve already been committed.
2️⃣ Idea 2: A town where time runs backward.
3️⃣ New Premise: A detective in a town where time moves backward must prevent crimes before they happen—while the town’s citizens slowly forget the past.
💡 Try This: Scroll through your Notion Idea Bank and find two unrelated ideas to merge into a new concept!
Step 4: Turning Ideas Into Workable Story Elements
🎭 Ideas are great, but execution is everything.
I’m not going to try and suggest that a couple of ideas mashed together is going to become the next Harry Potter but they might give you a starting point. They might also provide inspiration for a plot twist or a climatic scene. They might allow you to invert a common trope or come up with just the right McGuffin. But to do any of that they’ll need to be expanded.
I’ve always found the “gardening” metaphor to work particularly well when it comes to stories. Brandon Sanderson talks a lot about the differences between “Gardners & Architects” in his YouTube lecture series. A lot of authors will identify more as Pantsers (Gardners) or Plotters (Architects) although I think in reality it’s more of a sliding scale and we can pull various elements from both sides as and when required.
So how does this work with our bank of ideas?
When you start to mash together different ideas you’ll start to develop (what I call) story seeds. Small elements that can grow in any number of different ways.
1. Expanding a story seed into a workable concept
Expanding a seed involves asking yourself a number of questions. For instance consider
• Who is involved?
• What’s at stake?
Example:
• Idea: A cursed book that rewrites itself.
• Expanded Premise: A struggling writer finds a cursed book that rewrites itself based on their deepest fears—until it predicts their own death.
The nature of the seed should give you some idea of what it can grow into.
2. Testing an Idea Before Committing
• Write a 100-word microfiction version with the seed as the central idea or prompt.
• Summarise it in one sentence—if you can’t, it might still be too vague.
• If it still excites you after a week, it’s worth exploring.
Final Thoughts: Your Notion-Powered Creative System
By now, you should have:
✅ A constant stream of new ideas.
✅ A Notion system that captures & sorts them.
✅ A habit of revisiting and expanding ideas into story seeds.
💡 Challenge: Set up your Notion Story Idea Bank today, and capture five new ideas before the end of the week!
Your future writer self will thank you. 🚀
The next post in this series will build on this concept and look at ways in which we develop and expand these story seeds (using Notion obviously) to help grow our next blockbuster.
This is a really cool guide that I'm sure will help a lot of people out. I have a bad habit of not recording ideas when they strike, mostly because they come when I can't take my phone out (like driving, the shower, running, etc). But I'd really benefit from an organized tool like this.
The idea of adding something new to my tech stack when it's already so underutilized does concern me a bit, though. Using something new always sounds great at the moment, but I have a hard time sustaining the use of anything new, like Notion, over time.