Philip Roth's novels include "Portnoy's Complaint" and "Good-bye, Columbus." He told NPR about a how he happened on the subject of his latest, "Nemesis," about a polio epidemic.
"Roth explains that while he lived through the 20th-century American polio epidemic, he came up with the idea to write about the disease only after doing a simple brainstorming exercise.
"I began [writing] as I sometimes do with a book [by jotting down] on a yellow legal pad all of the historical events that I've lived through that I've not dealt with in fiction," Roth explains. "When I came to polio, it was a great revelation to me. I never thought of it before as a subject. And then I remembered how frightening it was and how deadly it was and I thought, 'OK, try to write a book about polio.' "
"...'So what I wanted to see is: Could I imagine what it would have been like, had the thing we all feared happened?" Roth says he used the same technique in his 2004 novel The Plot Against America, in which he imagined what would have happened had Charles Lindbergh defeated President Franklin Roosevelt in the election of 1940. And some of his other novels -- I Married a Communist, American Pastoral and The Human Stain -- also meditate on historical events during Roth's lifetime: blacklisting, the Vietnam War and World War II."
If you ever need ideas for what to write about, the Roth method might be an useful approach.
(For more ways to generate ideas, get my newest book, "Creativity Now!". It's published by pearson and you can get it on Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)
