Coming up with an idea for a story has never been hard for me. It was growing that seed into a full novel that has been the problem. I've never completed a novel, and while I used to blame it on my perfectionist fear of failure, I now know the problem lies in not being able to transform an idea into a story worth telling.
For years, I wrote by the seat of my pants, but recently I discovered that that doesn't work for me anymore. I realized that if I ever wanted to finish a novel, I shouldn't sit down and start writing the moment an idea pops into my head. What I needed to do was brainstorm and work on a basic plot and outline before I started writing, and that is what I did with my current project.

Story idea

The initial idea for my story developed quite a while ago, but for a long time, I didn't know what to do with it. So, I shelved the idea, and put my energy in different projects until April. The 15th of April to be precise. I had been binge-watching Peaky Blinders and come across the Spotlight trailer on Youtube, and that sparked an idea. Not wanting to lose it, I immediately opened Notes on my laptop and wrote down everything I could think of. It wasn't much, but by the next day, I had the bare bones of the story on paper.

Brainstorming

While I was fleshing out the skeleton plot, it turned out that I wasn't fully satisfied with it. Something was missing and I couldn't put my finger on it. So again, I decided to set it aside, but this time I wasn't going to work on different projects. I would use my energy to brainstorm instead. For a month, I put all the ideas I could come up with down in an old, unused notebook that I had found in the back of a desk drawer, and halfway May I had a breakthrough. Suddenly, I knew what had been missing and the best part of it was that there weren't any drastic changes to be made to the basic plot I already had. I only had to add a few things, and then it would be a story worth telling.
Another good thing that came out of brainstorming: I was able to give my new project a decent title. Instead of calling my novel Untitled (like I usually do with new projects), I refer to it as Posies and Paper Trails.