How to Come Up with Horse Story Ideas that are Original and High-Concept + 5 Writing Prompts to Get You Started

If you like writing, then you’re probably familiar with this scenario: you’re fired up to write, ready to pour your thoughts into words… and as soon as you open the Google Doc, you find yourself in shock. The cursor blinks, the page is blank, and you’re staring at the stark fact that you have absolutely no idea what to write about. Or maybe you hit a tough spot in your half-finished novel and you don’t know what supposed to happen next. And even if you have a horse story idea, with such a large market, how do you make sure that it’s not like every other horse book on the market?

Writers, don’t fear. Facing a blank mind of no ideas can cause panic, but today’s article will walk you through a three-step process to come up with original and high-concept horse story ideas, so that your book will stand out.

As a note, I would like to say that it’s almost impossible that your story will be completely unique. There’s nothing new under the sun, and at some point in time, even if your story is high-concept and original, someone else has done it. And that’s actually a good thing! That could just mean it’s a relatable storyline, and you want relatable.

What I mean by “original” is something that’s just different, that you put your own spin on. A girl who finds a pony in the yard to be her own? A bit cliche. A girl who finds a miniature horse while walking through Central Park in New York and smuggles it into her apartment? I’d be interested to read that.

With that in mind, let’s go to the first step in how to come up with high-concept and original horse story ideas.

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#1 Write Down All the Ideas You Have

I don’t know why, but writers are cursed with being extremely forgetful. Ever had that amazing in the shower, but as soon as you get out it’s gone? Yep. It’s happened to all of us. I even come up with fantastic story ideas in my dreams but I forget them as soon as I wake up.

So write all of the ideas down. Even if they’re random fragments of insanity like “floating goats”. As an ADHD gal, I tend to mentally obsess over an idea as I work to keep my brain firing and so I won’t forget the idea, then write something down as soon as possible. Don’t type them out– write them by hand. The process of writing by hand will cement them more in your mind. Tack them in a place where you can see them often, or keep a tiny notebook on hand. If you can’t see them, you’ll forget them.

What are you supposed to write on this master idea list? Literally anything could work, although you might need an entire notebook for story ideas if you have a sudden burst of creativity. What-if questions (what if a mining story was told from the POV of a mule?), character names, cool plot twists, random concept one-liners (the muddy boots on the back porch hadn’t been touched in a year), and anything you want to write about can be shoved into this notebook. Then, when you’re lacking inspiration, you can whip out your trusty little notebook and page through for some ideas.

This method has helped me come up with plenty of ideas– some that I will probably never use, and some that I hope to use in the future. That’s okay if you don’t use all of them at once. This is a vault, not your spending money. You save up your ideas so you can use them as needed.

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#2 Choose What Stands Out To You

Once you’ve completed your list, look over it again. Are there ideas that could fit together? Could that one random character concept for a horse who can fly match with that character concept for a lonely girl with no friends? Could that one song lyric “the sound of silence” matter to the story? And what if the entire setting was St. Louis in the fifties?

Combining a bunch of ideas together can be excellent way to come up with a new story idea, or maybe you just have one concept that stands out. For instance, after we watched an episode of Heartland about a trick rider who stopped riding when her sister died, I was hit with inspiration. What if a horse trainer of mustangs became a hermit after she lost everyone she loved? That was the first idea for Cassie Eldwin, the protagonist of my middle grade contemporary adventure novella, The Wild Side of the Mountain.

From a single concept, you can have a full-blown story idea, or you might need several concepts. This is why I like to keep a piece of paper in front of me while I watch movies or TV. I came up with the concept for The Wild Side of the Mountain from watching a single episode of Heartland. What ideas could you come up with watching your own favorite shows? (Now, I’m not saying you should watch TV all the time to come up with story ideas. Just that they can be useful for story ideas).

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#3 Refine and Build onto the Idea

Okay, so you have some vaguely outlined concept in your mind of what you want to write. What now?

Well, if you’re a pantser and you’re fired up enough, you might just go ahead and start working. But if you want to make sure that you won’t be burnt out later, it’s better to do some idea refining before you jump into the story itself.

First, ask yourself some questions about the story idea– is this story idea strong enough to carry a novel? Or would it be better as a short story? What characters do I want to include? What POV would it have?

I know this can seem overwhelming, but it really isn’t. Let’s go back to my earlier example with The Wild Side of the Mountain. When I came up with the idea for The Wild Side of the Mountain, I knew I wanted Cassie to be the main character, but the story also needed a second POV to really carry it. After finding an old idea for a girl who could talk to horses, I included Riley Monroe, a young teenager trying to get back to Denver from Spring Creek who stumbles onto Cassie’s homestead in the wilderness.

Next, I needed to find a conflict. A story needs to have both internal and external conflict to keep the scenes moving, so I tried to figure out what would have the most cause and effect in the plot. It ended up with Riley stumbling onto Cassie’s homestead in the middle of the night. Cassie doesn’t like intruders or interacting with humans (which I made sure to show in a previous chapter), but she’s not cruel. She takes Riley in for the night, with the intention of sending her straight home come morning. But the morning brings a snowstorm, blocking the roads to town. Riley is rude and bitter, and thinks Cassie is strange and ridiculous, and Cassie sees Riley as a conceited brat that she just wants to get off her land. This is called the inciting incident, the call to adventure that kicks off every great story.

So we have conflict and two very interesting characters from our story idea. What do we do next? Could this be enough to keep the story going? Maybe, but I think it needs a little more. What if Cassie and Riley had to work together for the same cause? Enter in the mustang herd that Cassie cares for in honor of her passed sister, who loved the mustangs. The mustang foals are sick and Cassie doesn’t know why, and the stallion won’t let her get close enough to the herd to really examine them. Riley can talk to animals, and with this reveal she convinces Cassie to let her help treat the mustangs. This is the acceptance of the call to adventure, the end of the First Act. (I can’t go into story structure in detail in this article, but if you want to learn more, you can check out K. M. Weiland’s site Helping Writers Become Authors.)

What happens next? Riley and Cassie struggle to figure out what’s wrong with the horses. Repeated snow flurries lead to the roads being blocked, but by the middle of the story, Cassie is too focused on helping the mustangs to care. Since inner conflict is just as important as plot, I made sure to include scenes where Riley and Cassie let their guards down enough to actually get to know each other. Usually this ended badly, but the characters were still beginning to understand each other.

Well, I needed some sort of game changer, some sort of action that would cement the fact to the readers and to Cassie herself that yes, she was becoming attached to this little girl. This is the midpoint, and it comes when Riley runs away and Cassie has to find her before dark, realizing she actually cares if something happens to this girl.

But the problem of treating the mustangs isn’t over after the midpoint. Something had to happen next; the conflict has to build up. So Cassie and Riley make a breakthrough in what the mustang’s disease could be, but before they can do anything about it, the lead mare Evergreen dies, and the stallion warns them that if they come back, he’d kill them. Riley and Cassie now must keep Evergreen’s young foal alive, and Riley finds out that she’s going to be going back to her aunt’s house soon now that the roads are clearing. This is the dark moment of the story, the low point for the characters, and the end of the second act.

The ending of the story is almost here, and I want the characters to tie up all the loose ends. To stuff away her emotions at Riley leaving, Cassie goes out and finds the body of a foal, doing an autopsy for the first time. She knows what’s making the mustang’s sick, but is faced with a dilemma– the closest person with a cure is one of her bitter enemies, and she refuses to talk to him. Riley, furious that Cassie would put her fears and past over the horses, rides out on her own, but the horse spooks and she falls into a gully. When Cassie learns of this, she is forced to go find her enemy for help to save Riley’s life. This is the climax, the intense end of the story.

We can’t just end at the climax though. We have to decide whether we want the characters to succeed, fail, or something in between. In the end, Riley is rescued, and Cassie retrieves the medicine for the horses. While Riley can’t understand animals anymore, she’s found an unusual mentor in Cassie, and through Riley, Cassie has been able to heal from her grief of the past.

And there we have it! An entire story plot! Some pantsers may notice that this is an outline, and yes, it can be this simple. I used to dread outlines because I felt like they sapped my creativity, but they don’t have to! They can actually make it a world easier to write.

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How to Apply This to Your Own Writing + Five Writing Prompts to Get You Started

How can you apply this to your own writing? Well, it’s pretty simple. You just need to find the story idea that stands out to you, that screams at you that you have to write this. Create the idea notebook, and look at each story idea. Could you combine some to make them interesting? Is there a character with an interesting backstory you could include?

You can also take elements from old stories you’ve given up on and combine them. Sometimes two melting pots of bad ideas and prose can make a delightful cheese sauce of a brilliant story.

If you’re stuck on what to include in that notebook, here’s five writing prompts that you can start out with. I like to have a picture and a quote with each, because I’m more of a visual person.

FANTASY

A horse of the air and the horse of the land couldn’t possibly fall in love…

CONTEMPORARY

(This is a quote/picture in itself)

HISTORICAL

There, struggling among the wreckage of the chariots, was a horse.

MYSTERY

The legend says he protects those who come into his wood… and kill those who deceive others.

ROMANCE

“You say you raced someone? Who was it?”

“I don’t know… I didn’t get a look at his face… but I won.”

How do you all come up with ideas? Is there a horse idea that you would love to write, but you’re stuck on what to do? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see if I can help you.