This Week’s Topic:
When you need creative inspiration, where do you go?
Ah what an awesome question! I find inspiration in daily life, seeing a particularly strange/quirky/odd person in town might become the basis for a character. Experiencing life in general tends to become the basis for my stories but sometimes that’s just not enough.
When I’m feeling creatively constipated and in need of inspiration, I have several sources to which I turn.
1) DeviantArt: The artworks on this site have inspired numerous stories, provided ideas for individual scenes or provided the faces for my characters who are just names on a page.
2) Youtube: Trawling through music videos is not procrastination, it’s inspiring. Many of my stories including two published short stories (Vox Clamantis in Deserto and Where Dreams are Grown) were directly inspired by music videos (in flames and Nightwish respectively).
3) Music: Everything from album and song titles to snatches of lyrics and the musical works themselves. Music has always moved me. I may be a writer now, but I have always and will always be a musician first. For this reason, I tend to take the greatest and most profound inspiration from music. The band Explosions in the Sky (incredible, check them out!) is, in a way, directly responsible for my new YA novel awaiting publication with Etopia Press. Their music conjured up a setting in my mind, that setting demanded a story and so a book was born.
To a lesser extent, movies, TV and other books can also be inspiring but I find they often nullify my desire to write because I look at what those writers did and think I’ll never be as good as them. Hence, my return to music.
Where do you go to find inspiration?
