When I was about ten years old, I kept a daily diary that I called "Royal". It had owls on the cover and was a spiral, hardbound journal. I kept that diary for about a year until I missed a day and completely forgot to write in the diary again. However, I soon continued writing in journals all the way up from elementary to the present day, and they have proved instrumental in my writing. And they should be a part of yours, too.
I'm not saying you have to keep a diary, but keeping a journal of ideas is essential for you as a writer. Often, new writers jump into a story draft too quickly, without allowing the "spark" idea to stew and develop itself further. It starts out as "dystopia" but never grows beyond that to "a deep epic about the natures of power and how it corrupts others". It starts out as "hero-villain relationship" without becoming "a tragic story about friends torn apart by the traumatized one turning evil". These stories are sad because they could be so much more, but aren't.
The answer is to slow down. In this part, you'll learn lots of ways to collect and explore ideas. But none of that can start until you have a place to record them. I advise people to keep their journal either in a portable-sized notebook (a diary-sized journal), or a Doc/note app on their phone. That way, you can always have it with you if sudden inspiration strikes.
I advise people to write every day. That doesn't mean you have to record your life (unless you want to, and that can certainly be inspiration for a novel or character struggle). But you should be adding to it, and to your lifetime "word count", every day. What sorts of things can you write in your journal?
- Daily recordings of your life
- Your feelings (especially if they're strong feelings)
- Random thoughts you've had
- Descriptions of your surroundings
- Quotes you like
- Drawings
- Any story idea that comes to mind
- Just...rambling
- Scattered dialogue
- A writing prompt you saw online
- Poetry
- A short story
- Dumb things you can't say aloud
- Dreams you had last night
- Fanfiction
And more! Simply put, you can write anything in your journal. You may think this exercise is silly, but the more you write, the more there is to draw from. You might ask how things like rambling or dumb things you can't say aloud will help you generate an idea for a story. To that I'll say that your work might be less dumb than you think, and may even have the potential for greatness. Or maybe, amidst all the sludge, there's a single diamond that can be the spark for your magnum opus.
Your journal is the record of your thoughts. It's compost for your stories. There are times when I've been stuck on a part of my draft, or had no idea what to write for a contest or assignment, and when I looked through my journals I found what I needed to keep writing. No matter how incoherent your work is, there is always the potential for it to turn into a story that can touch people's hearts.
In the next chapter, I'll give some tips on how to collect ideas. When you train your mind, you'll find that they're all around you, and it may not be half as hard as one thinks.