The Hidden SECRET to Making Fiction Ideas FLOW Without Struggle

Many writers start with a killer premise—an idea that sparks excitement and promise—but when it comes time to actually write the story, they get stuck. Maybe they don’t know how to end it. Maybe the middle sags. Maybe they just can’t seem to finish the thing.

One huge reason this happens is because most writers try to create their stories using the conscious mind—the same part of the brain we use for to-do lists, scheduling, and washing dishes. But the truth is, your best storytelling doesn’t live there.

It lives in the subconscious mind—the seat of emotion, imagination, memory, intuition, and identity. This is where your most powerful creative flow begins. And it’s the secret to writing stories that feel aligned, emotionally rich, and deeply original.

Understanding the Subconscious: The True Source of Creativity

The subconscious is responsible for everything that makes stories come alive: emotions, lived experience, imagination, character perspective, and spiritual identity. It’s the part of your mind that’s already holding your best ideas, and it’s quietly influencing how you tell stories—whether you realize it or not.

Any time you've gotten lost in a book or driven home without remembering how you got there, you've slipped into the subconscious. It's what allows you to fully experience a story—and it's also where that story is best written from.

When you write from your conscious mind, you often end up recycling story elements from books and films you can consciously recall. That’s why your plot might feel forced or cliché. But when you write from your subconscious, you tap into your unique lens: your life experience, emotional memory, and soul-level imagination. That's what makes a story yours.

Making Fiction Ideas FLOW: How to Turn On the Creative Tap

Most of us only access our subconscious in short bursts—those lightning strikes of inspiration that vanish as quickly as they appear. But what if you could turn on the flow and keep it running? That’s what I call Making Fiction Ideas FLOW—and yes, you can do it intentionally.

Here’s how it works:

• Meditation primes your mind and gives your subconscious permission to deliver ideas.

• Journaling with strategic prompts allows you to access ideas already inside you.

• Imaginative Discovery opens space for emotion, backstory, and unique story events to emerge.

• Intuition helps you make aligned decisions (especially when you're stuck between two ideas).

• Focus Declarations break through mental blocks and rewire unhelpful beliefs about your writing.

When you consistently use these tools, your story will start writing itself. Plot points, character arcs, emotional beats, and twists will come to you with less effort—and a lot more joy.

Plotter vs. Pantser: Who Taps Into the Subconscious Best?

You've probably heard the debate: plotters vs. pantsers. Plotters outline everything in advance; pantsers (a.k.a. discovery writers) dive in with no plan. But here's what most people don’t realize:

• Pantsers naturally use their subconscious. When they start typing, they access emotion and flow. But because they don’t give the subconscious direction, they often waste time, throw away scenes, or stall in the middle of their draft.

• Plotters rely on conscious planning. Their outlines often feel stiff or uninspired—until they start writing and surrender to the subconscious. That’s when better ideas appear and the outline gets tossed.

The key is to combine the subconscious with structure. Use templates, plot points, and frameworks to guide your subconscious—not suppress it. Story structure doesn’t stifle creativity; it gives it direction. When you give your subconscious a roadmap, it delivers extraordinary, original results.

Writing with Soul: Why Subconscious Storytelling Creates Better Books

Here’s the truth: every great story follows a basic template. Even authors who claim to hate structure still write stories that unconsciously hit story beats. That’s because human brains are wired to expect pattern and progression in storytelling.

But the secret isn’t avoiding templates. It’s filling them with your unique subconscious voice.

Think of structure like clothing. We all wear it, but style, fit, color, and texture make us look completely different. Templates give your story shape. Your subconscious gives it soul.

Writing from your subconscious ensures your story:

• Feels aligned with your passion

• Avoids cliché, even in well-trodden genres

• Flows easily, with fewer blocks and more breakthroughs

• Brings deep emotional truth to every page

• Keeps readers turning the page—and feeling every beat

If you’re not feeling passion and excitement when you write, chances are you’re operating too much from the conscious mind. When you switch into subconscious creation, your enthusiasm transfers into your story—and your reader will feel it too.

Activate Your Subconscious and Become a Storyteller on Fire

The bottom line? You’re already more creative than you realize. Your subconscious mind is bursting with answers, ideas, and emotions just waiting to pour into your story. All you have to do is learn how to access it intentionally.

Inside the Subconscious Storyteller training, I’ll guide you through how to prime your brain, unlock intuitive direction, and keep the creative flow going—all using meditations, journaling prompts, and decision-making tools designed for authors like you.

You’ll learn how to:

• Turn vague story sparks into fully plotted novels

• Infuse deep emotion and originality into every scene

• Stop second-guessing your ideas and start writing

• Create a story that only you could tell

So if you’re ready to stop forcing your story from your conscious mind and start Making Fiction Ideas FLOW, stay tuned. This is where your most inspired storytelling begins.

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Get my free 10 Universal Plot Points to Craft Any Story mini course here: https://bit.ly/10plotpoints

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Podcast Transcript:

Hi there! Do you have a great idea for a fiction story? A story you're dying to bring to the world, but you don't know where you're going with it, don't know how to fill out a compelling plot, and have a hard time sitting down to even write words, much less finish your story? Even when you do write, do you worry that it's boring, that it drags, and that readers are going to hate it? So you stay stuck, write and rewrite the same scenes, and eventually give up, ending up with a file of half-written manuscripts and glorious story ideas on your computer. Hi, my name is Liesl, USA Today best-selling author and writer of four genres, and I've been writing fiction for more than 15 years. I teach fiction authors to write highly emotional stories based on elements of psychology and spirituality, with an emphasis on your unique subconscious creativity.

Did you know that human beings cannot be emotionally healthy without stories? That we'd all literally go mad if we couldn't tell ourselves stories and derive meaning from them? It's true, and a scientifically proven fact. So grab your chocolate of choice and your fuzzy slippers. Let's turn that story snippet knocking around in your brain into a full-length novel that will give your reader that emotionally cathartic experience they long for, make you money, and change the world.

Who's with me? So emotion is how the reader connects with your story, as we talked about in the previous videos. Now let's talk about you, the author, and how you can bring them the best story possible. Okay, so the next problem most of us have is actually finishing our book.

We have a dynamite premise, but don't know where we're going with it. We struggle to fill in events in our plot. We may have the beginning but not the end, or the end but not the beginning, and then there's that pesky middle that tends to sag, right? So there are two reasons for this.

One of them is not understanding the true nature of story, which is transformational human psychology, and we will address that in the next video. But the other reason is because you're trying to force your story out using your conscious mind, rather than tapping into the subconscious mind where your creativity actually lives. So let's talk about these.

The conscious mind is the one you use for most tasks you have to physically do throughout the day. Go to work, make meals, run errands, household chores, to-do lists. The conscious mind is all about being present in the moment.

It controls tangible 3D things that we have to physically do. The subconscious mind is beneath the conscious mind, hence the sub part, right? And it has to do with non-physical things. Emotions, creativity, memory, imagination, and basic identity are all housed in the subconscious mind.

These are our inner thoughts and emotions. So when I say identity, I mean this is who we are at our core. It's our deepest beliefs and spiritual identity.

It also houses every experience we've ever had and every piece of knowledge we've ever acquired. So the lens through which we see the world, experiences, culture, upbringing, trauma, happiness, beliefs, memories, all of that comes from the subconscious mind. And that's important because it will shape your author voice, the voice of your narrative, and it will also color your characters.

While I'm going to teach you how to make your characters very distinctive and jump off the page as it were, your unique perspective will still influence that character. I'll never write a villain the exact same way that you would write that same villain because we have different backgrounds and life experiences. So the way we craft a villain, even if the traits we plan for them are the same, will be different.

And this all comes from the subconscious mind. So how do we tap in to the subconscious? Well, you already are. You just don't realize you're doing it.

You switch between the conscious and the subconscious mind all the time. Think about the last time you got lost in your favorite book. Imagine sitting or lying down in your favorite reading spot.

You're totally lost in the story, seeing past the words, and imagining the story in your mind. You're experiencing the story, right? Now imagine that a crash comes from the next room. What happens? It jerks you out of the story and into the present.

You jump up and you hurry into the next room to make sure everything's okay and hopefully nothing too earth-shattering happened, right? Then when you have everything squared away, you've got it figured out, you return to your book and jump right back into the experience of the story again, right? Well, you just switched from your subconscious to your conscious mind and back again. When you're in the present, before you begin reading, you're using your conscious mind. The experience of imagining a story and living it vicariously happens entirely in the subconscious mind.

When you get jerked out of the story by reality, you're back to the conscious mind. You see what I mean? Another example of this is when you drive home mindlessly. Have you ever had that experience where you're driving a route, maybe to or from work or to a store you visit regularly or a friend or family member's home, and after you drive it, you have no recollection of doing so? You start to worry that maybe you ran red lights or stop signs because you honestly don't remember driving home.

Well, I promise you, you didn't run any red lights or stop signs. You were able to put driving on autopilot and get lost in your subconscious mind. That works specifically because you had no problems driving home.

So if you had run a red light or had any other issues, your subconscious would have alerted you and it would have brought you right back to the present out of your daydreams, right? And you would have realized what happened. So the fact that you don't remember anything like that means everything went smoothly. You're good.

You are very safe driving home, right? But the point is getting lost in a memory or a story or letting your mind wander are all examples of getting lost in the subconscious mind. So what does this have to do with writing or storytelling? Well, just as stories are experienced with the subconscious mind, like when you're reading them, they should be written from the subconscious mind as well because your creativity lives in the subconscious. I really don't think it's even possible to do anything creative with the conscious mind.

That's just not where your creativity comes from. But whatever parts of your story you have created already have come from your subconscious. But most likely these were just tiny lightning strike inspirations that filtered up through your conscious mind, right? We don't realize that most of the time we are blocking our subconscious creativity.

So what does get through, it's either because we did relax into the subconscious mind, even just briefly, or somehow it just bubbled up and broke through and you guys, I promise your subconscious is pounding on your conscious mind. It wants to get through, but we just don't realize that what we do inadvertently blocks it. So now imagine if you tapped directly into your subconscious creativity, instead of a trickle or a few tiny lightning strikes of inspiration, it would be like turning on a powerful tap that will just constantly flow with great ideas.

And that's what I'm going to Yeah, but I know what I want to write about. I have my premise. I'm not hurting for ideas.

And fair enough. But this also works on a smaller, deeper level than that. Turning on your subconscious mind will not only give you big story ideas, it will help you turn on the tap for how to fill out plots for those ideas, fill in events, figure out what happens next, how to begin, how to end, anything you need, any question or problem you have, your subconscious mind will be able to solve it, answer it, or give it to you.

Why? Because your subconscious is connected to the divine. This is something that all of us inherently have access to, and it can give us unique answers about what will be best for us, including our unique stories. But most people don't know they have access to this or how to use it.

So lots of self-help programs and spiritual programs will teach you to use intuition, and it's usually about yourself. It's like big life questions, right? Like, what is my career going to be? Or what should I study? Or who is my partner going to be? Or things like that. But the fact is, we've already established that your story comes from your subconscious mind, so your story is an extension of you.

And your subconscious mind, your intuition, can tell you what will be best for your story in terms of the story that is uniquely yours and that you are trying to tell. But most authors don't know this, and they don't make use of it. So we're going to talk about this more as we move along.

But for a minute, let's talk about plotting versus pantsing, the eternal debate, right? The other thing you might experience will depend on whether you're a plotter, which means someone who plans and outlines before they start writing, or a pantser, sometimes called a discovery writer, which is someone who does no planning and just sits down and starts typing. Pantsers, believe it or not, have a leg up on plotters when it comes to the subconscious mind. They are more naturally tapping into their subconscious minds than plotters are.

But of course, the problem with pantsing is that it takes much longer. You end up throwing away a lot of words as you figure out what your story will be, and many people see it as a major time suck or time waster. Plotters have theoretically solved the problem of time.

The idea is if you plan in advance, you should be able to cut down on wasted time and wasted words. You should be able to kill fewer of your darlings, as it were, but that's assuming you stick to your outline. Because plotters have a more difficult time tapping into the subconscious, they often fill out their outline using the conscious mind, and that leads to mediocre stories and cliches.

Then, when they sit down to actually do the writing, they surrender to the subconscious and start coming up with all kinds of good ideas, much better than what they put in their outline. Therefore, the outline goes out the window. So let's talk about what's really happening here in the brain.

When you start typing, it's a lot like journaling, okay? It's about your story rather than about you personally, but the process is almost identical. You naturally turn off your conscious mind and start using the subconscious mind. You just never realized that's what you were doing before, and that's why pansers and discovery writers have the advantage.

They've already mastered creating their story from their subconscious mind. The problem is that there is no direction, okay? Your subconscious mind can hem and haw and meander with the best of them if it doesn't have direction, and this is why writing a story this way takes so long, and you end up throwing so many of the words away. Outlining theoretically solves the problem of time, but many outliners use their conscious minds to create their outline, and if they do that, then what they come up with by definition has not come from their unique creativity, and it's not colored by the lens of their unique identity and experiences.

So when they start typing and do surrender to the subconscious mind in the same way pansers do, then they get much more inspired ideas that are way better than what they wrote in their outline, hence they throw the outline away, okay? If you have a great idea for a story premise but you don't know where you're going with it, if you're having a really hard time filling in plot events or finishing your current WIP, or if you're constantly worried that your story is boring or dragging or that your readers won't like it, then I encourage you to join the Legendary Fiction Forge, my monthly membership for fiction authors. Inside, I will give you the complete A to Z blueprint for how to write highly emotional stories that your readers will absolutely fall in love with, no matter what your genre or tropes are. Want to become a widely read, highly paid master storyteller? Then join us in the Legendary Fiction Forge and finally get that epic story that's been knocking around in your brain forever out to the world.

So here's the other thing about outlines and templates in the conscious or even the subconscious mind, okay? Lots of authors say they don't like to use outlines and templates. By templates, just so you know, I mean things like plot points, the hero's journey, save the cat, that sort of thing. They say they don't like to follow those because they don't want to be adversely influenced by them, they think templates stifle their creativity, or because they fear anything written using those templates will end up being cliche.

Let's just debunk all of these arguments, shall we? First, you are influenced by every experience that you have. Everything you read, hear, see, smell, taste, feel, or otherwise experience will live forever in your subconscious mind and will therefore color on some level what you write. That's just the nature of how we're built.

So to say you don't want to be influenced by something is a little bit silly and illogical to begin with. Next, everyone who writes stories follows a template, whether they realize it or not. We'll get more into this in the next video about THP, but even those who claim to not like templates, they still follow basic story structure.

Therefore, they're still following a template. If you really aren't following even basic story structure and your story is just meandering all over the place, going off the rails, no human being is ever going to like your story and chances are they aren't going to finish it. Remember that readers are intuitively familiar with story structure and if they don't subconsciously recognize the pattern they're expecting, they're not going to be able to connect with it.

So saying that you don't like templates is basically saying you don't like readers and you don't actually want a reader to read your story and connect with it. The next thing is that restrictions actually free creativity. I could use a lot of possible metaphors to illustrate this, but in this case, I think we can stick with story writing.

If we could write absolutely anything and everything we want into one story, not follow any story structure or stick to any genre or any other rule at all, what would that story look like? I mean, there could first be a vampire and then a witch and then a dragon and then some terrorists and then a mafia romance and then maybe some high school hockey and on and on and on. You guys, I have actually read stories where the author has done this. It would be almost impossible to derive meaning from a story like this because it's nonsensical.

There's no order or pattern to it. So our human brains have trouble latching on or even understanding. Those stories that I read, there was no through line, right? There was no goal that the reader was aiming or that the, excuse me, that the character was aiming for and you just, there was no cohesion to the story, right? And I'm telling you, a reader doesn't put up with that for more than a couple of pages and then they toss the book.

If we had a contest where we were all given an outline, rules we had to abide by in the story, and we all just had to see who could write it the best, that actually frees your creativity. The generalities of the story, the parameters of it are already in place and then we're free to focus in on the details and make them as emotionally and, excuse me, as emotional and uniquely ours as we can. That's pretty much how genre and tropes work, right? And what about writing to a cliche? The solution is the same, the subconscious mind.

Think of it this way. There are certain things, patterns or templates that we can't get away from as human beings, but the details supplied by our subconscious minds are what make us unique and different. So think about our physical bodies.

We all have hair, right? And yes, I know some people are bald, but we all have potential for hair. We all have hair follicles, right? And being bald is either a genetic thing or it's a choice if someone shaves their head. Either way, we all have the potential for hair, but how we style it is what makes us unique.

So it can include the actual style or the cut or the color or even the accessories we use. So it's like we all have hair, but then we take that hair and we make it uniquely ours. We make it match our personality, right? And that's what makes us unique.

The same with our clothes. We all wear clothing in general, unless you're part of a nudist colony or something, but the types of clothing, the cut, the color, the weave, all of those things are individual. That's what makes us uniquely us.

And it's the same thing with story templates. All stories follow the same basic template, which I'll talk about more in the next video. Using your subconscious mind to make every step of that basic template uniquely yours is the real secret behind writing great fiction.

You'll be adhering to the basic story structure the reader can recognize and identify with, but you'll be using your subconscious mind to make sure you don't write to a cliche, to make that story uniquely yours. And what is happening when you fill in a template with your subconscious mind? I keep saying that, so what does that actually mean? Well, your conscious mind is full of things that you are aware of and can call to mind on command, okay? And just so you know, your subconscious mind houses things you are not consciously aware of. So if you're using your conscious mind to fill in a template or craft a story, you're literally pulling from other stories that you've read or watched that you remember and can call to mind.

And understand, I don't mean plagiarism. I don't mean you're copying the story. That's not what's happening.

Rather, your conscious mind just cycles through other stories it's familiar with and tries to pull out elements that will fit what you're looking for in your story. So it's kind of like, all right, I'm writing a medieval fantasy and I need a story escalation. Hmm, in Lord of the Rings, the story escalation was this.

So maybe something like that can work for my story and I'll just tailor it to my story, right? That's what I mean. We're using stories we're consciously aware of and we're pulling ideas from them. Now, it's not inherently a bad thing.

That can work sometimes. But it's also why stories you write sometimes feel off or unaligned or just not good enough, okay? It's writing to a cliche almost by definition. You're recycling the elements of other authors' stories rather than asking your subconscious and your higher self what would be best for your unique story.

And I haven't even talked about passion yet. I'll cover this more in the final foundational video. But just know for now that writing from your subconscious mind is what makes you the most passionate about your story.

Because it comes from your unique creativity, from the core of who you are, and is colored through the lens of your emotions, memories, experiences. And so you can't help but be passionate, inspired, and lit up about it. We are energetic beings and that means exactly what it sounds like.

We're that energy into everything we do and especially everything we create. So the energy, excitement, and passion with which you write your story will bleed through your words and affect your reader. In other words, the excitement and passion with which you write your story will be the same excitement and passion your readers will feel when reading your story.

If you don't feel over the top excitement about your story, your reader won't either. And this may be a sign that you're writing the story from your conscious rather than your subconscious mind. So how do we craft stories from our subconscious mind? Let's put it into practice.

I'm going to give you the entire process in detail in the Subconscious Storyteller module. For now, here are the basics. You're going to prime your mind, your brain, using meditation.

I'm going to give you many meditations throughout this program. I encourage you not only to listen to them, but to listen to them multiple times. As often as you can.

Meditation commands our subconscious to shift and become what we want to be. For example, to become a natural storyteller for whom the avenues of creativity are always open and flowing. Such that every time you come up with a story idea, the ideas for how to fill it, create it from beginning to end, craft characters, infuse emotion, and all the things just happen naturally and quickly.

And you really can turn yourself into that simply by commanding your subconscious mind. We do this by getting quiet and relaxed, regulating our emotions and nervous systems, and envisioning what we want. Turn on the tap.

We'll turn on the tap and flow of ideas through journaling, structured questions, and imaginative discovery. Plenty of people journal, but very few authors use journaling to create their stories. But as we talked about with pansing and discovery writing, journaling can meander as well if the right questions aren't being asked.

Think of your subconscious kind of like AI. It's only as good as the questions you ask and the prompts you enter into it. If you ask a general question, you're going to get a general answer.

If you ask a sloppy question, you may get an incorrect answer. If you ask a very specific, structured, relevant, and detailed question, you're going to get an answer that's inspired. Then you're going to use intuition for decision making.

Now understand that 99% of the time using journaling and imaginative discovery will be more than enough to figure out everything about your story. But let's say, for example, that you have two possible endings for your story. You like them both and can't decide between them.

Well, the first thing I would tell you to do is ask your subconscious and journal on some way that you can fuse both endings into one and use them both. The reason for that is because you obviously, if you like them both, you have passion for them both and maybe the things you are passionate about in each of them both need to be incorporated into the story. And your subconscious really can help you do that.

But if you're set on just one ending or the other, that's when intuition is going to kick in to help you. I'll show you how to use it to get more direct answers when you're dealing with intuition to figure out which one would be better. I also give you affirmations and focus declarations to work through blocks and shift beliefs.

So assuming you're using your subconscious mind to write in the full THP framework, which I'll show you, so that you know what to write, you should be able to just sit down and really fly through your story at that point. But sometimes we do still struggle. This is usually because we have an energetic block.

These are usually due to unresolved trauma or limiting beliefs. And I'm and emotional ingredients and focus declarations to shift your beliefs and identity and work through these blocks that may be tripping you up. Especially as you get more experience, this will just start to happen pretty naturally.

You'll start to go through these processes and it will become easier and easier. So key takeaway, using your subconscious mind to craft your story through journaling and other practices. Number one, help you write the most unique story possible.

Number two, always keep a flow of unique creative ideas for any question you have flowing. Keep you from writing to a cliche, give you passion and satisfaction in writing your story, and will help you finish or fill in your story without getting blocked or fearing what you write isn't good enough. Thanks for listening today.

If this episode helped or inspired you in any way, would you do me a solid and leave me a review? Reviews help other fiction authors find the podcast. You can also recommend it to a writer friend of yours so they can get the same inspiration you got. Remember, you have a story inside you that only you can tell.

So get out there and write your soul story because your readers are waiting for it with bated breath.