It’s the nightmare of writers: the dreaded writer’s block. The reasons for the block are many, such as writing yourself into a corner or you’ve just lost interest in the story. But one reason is you don’t know what to write.

You can find topic inspiration from everywhere. Yeah, I know you’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again many times over your writing career.

You can find inspiration in the news, from friends, or even a car commercial. For instance, the Carvana commercials. I’m mainly going to focus on them talking about their “car vending machine.”

A car vending machine sounds funny just on its own, but it does open up other ideas. Like, what happens if a car gets stuck? We’ve all had that moment when the drink or snack you wanted from a food vending machine gets stuck, so what do you do when your car gets stuck in a vending machine?

Does a giant come along and tilt and kick the machine until the car comes out?

Has a person gotten stuck in the machine while trying to pull the car out? We’ve all seen the joke of a person getting their hand or whole body stuck in the vending machine.

Do you have to pay for another car to unstick the one you’ve already bought? We’ve seen or done that: put in more money to try and push the stuck item out.

And what happens if the car vending machine is broken. We’ve seen food vending machines that spit out can after can of soda, so would a broken car vending machine fire out cars? And how much damage would that do? It hurts getting hit by a can, imagine the damage a car could do. Who needs a doomsday weapon, just have a malfunctioning car vending machine and you could take out a city block.

We’ve all seen that scene in a movie where a teen becomes popular because they can get free soda out of the vending machine. Imagine how popular they’d be if they could get free cars out of a vending machine.

So to finish, look at all the potential stories just from one sentence in a car commercial. They might not be long stories, but at least it might get your mind off your troubles long enough to come up with an idea for a novel. Also, it’ll keep your skills sharp for when that big idea does it.