Where to find inspiration? (Part 1)
What to do when your muse just isn’t singing to you? Today I’ll give you my top two recommendations for this very problem!
1) Sometimes you just need a break! Go for a walk, put together a puzzle, play a video game, read a book, take a bike ride, draw, look at art. Whatever you enjoy doing! Get your mind working in a different way and especially get your body moving! Taking a “brain break” is a real thing and it’s vital to the creative process. I’ll come back to this in a moment.
2) Talk it out! The other thing that helps me the most is talking it out with my creative peeps. I especially like coming to Dustin and Phil with my creative problems. They have very different insights and perspectives on things than I do. In addition they have a lot more experience and practice and they’re good at helping brainstorm new ideas and troubleshoot difficult spots. In my opinion, having a group of creative friends (or in my case, mentors) you can bounce ideas off of is essential.
For those of you in a hurry today, that’s the Spark Notes version. BUT if you’re interested in more of a deep dive into what inspires me, then let’s keep going!
For our deep dive, let’s talk about sources of inspiration and how to use them. This is going to be different for everyone, and you’ll have to discover what works best for you. There’s no right or wrong answer to what inspires you! Here are some things I use to come up with new ideas and/or to write more deeply about what my characters are experiencing.
One thing I like to do is watch nature documentaries or documentaries about ancient civilizations. In contrast, Dustin does a lot of research and reading up on various cultures and civilizations. He’s something of a history buff, and gets a lot of ideas from that. No one knows what inspires Phil. He’s a mystery wrapped inside an enigma. For me, I have found that in many cases truth can be stranger than fiction. Further, fiction can be made better when using bits and pieces of science or history based facts.
I’m not saying you have to be an astrophysicist to write good science fiction. However, doing some research will likely spark new ideas you might not have thought of, and allow you to write with confidence. Plus, readers are smart! So if you can write in a knowledgeable and informed way, they will pick up on that, and your writing is more likely to resonate with your intended audience. It helps with suspension of disbelief and lets your reader really lose themselves in the story. Phil once told me “I want to feel like I’m in the hands of a capable story teller.” That really resonated with me, so I want to make sure that my readers feel the same way. What I am learning as I am working my way through my second draft is that paying attention to all those little details and making sure your information is accurate will really add a lot of depth to your work.
As an example I recently watched a documentary about whales. In the documentary there were divers who were free diving to film the whales. They were able to get quite close and record whale sounds. When they came up they said that when the whales made sounds, they could actually feel it in their chest, because sometimes the whales communicate at such a low decibels. The divers were literally feeling the vibration of the sound as it moved through the water (and through them) because it was that powerful. For me, I thought, if my characters ever encounter a huge monster and it makes noise, that might be a cool detail to add. So even though I’m writing a work of fiction in a medieval setting that has nothing to do with sailing or whales, I was still able to pull some ideas from that documentary. Neat. History and nature are always great sources for inspiration!
Apparently I had a lot more to say about this than I realized, so I think I’m going to break this up into a couple of posts for more bite-sized nuggets of information. Stay tuned for more. I’m signing off for now, but until next time dear readers, put your phones away, get outside, take a walk, and let nature inspire you! <3
