A lot of people ask me where I get my ideas from for writing. For many years when I was younger, I had trouble with inspiration. Ideas were like birds I could see only in the distance, in a sky I could never reach. Bits of them floated to the ground once in a while—useless, discarded feathers. It wasn’t until I spent more time writing, every day, that the ideas started flocking into my head. I developed some habits that called them to me, like scattering mental birdseed around to draw them in. Here are some of them:
1. Exercise/meditation/hiking: spend some time alone in your head. If you’re like me, sitting around doing nothing may drive you crazy, so I have found that if I do something physical while I’m wandering the pathways of my mind, ideas float into my consciousness with almost no effort.
2. Listen to music: let your favorite melodies calm your brain so that you can relax enough to stop doubting yourself. Doubt kills creativity.
3. Stop and look around: give yourself thirty seconds on the way to your car, or the grocery store, or even just walking down the hallway, to stop and observe one thing with great attention. I tend to watch birds, look for stars, examine snowflakes or flowers in a way that helps my mind create mental pictures. When writing, a good sense of imaginary places is essential. Looking at things develops the ability to envision spaces in your head.
4. Be nice to yourself: stop stopping. Just start writing something, even if you think it sucks. It probably does, but you can always fix it later. Writing is like running: you need to warm up sometimes. And telling yourself that it sucks just reinforces your ability to doubt yourself. Stop that.
5. Skip the depressing things: don’t read the horrible news story, avoid the annoying friend on Facebook, stop watching war movies right before you go to sleep. Sometimes the bad stuff lingers in your psyche and you’re not even aware of it. This is probably my greatest difficulty, but I have been trying to get better at allowing myself to not feel the bad stuff. Don’t let others steal your joy and replace it with misery.
7 thoughts on “5 ways to jumpstart inspiration”
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Christine Klocek-Lim 
You’re my writing twin, lol. I do the same things, only with the last one, I have problems. Depressing stuff attracts me like nothing else and then I can’t ‘cleanse’ my mind of it. But especially the first one is very important, I think.
Bridie! I love that we’re writing twins. And the last one is my difficult one, too. I’m still working on it. I’ve gotten better at not clicking on the sad/awful/bad links, but I’m only human, right? 😉
I love this and will definitely try them. Exercise is working for me already — I get ideas during yoga all the time. The first one I may try is writing something even if it sucks. I usually stop and change direction, but that’s an interesting idea. I don’t remember who it was, but there’s a story about a great composer, who was asked by an another composer how his symphonies could be so great, while his weren’t? The great composer said that the average composer considered only great ideas, while the great composer considered both good and bad ones.
I think my favorite is to give one thing close attention. I’m usually so focused on getting the scene down that I’m chattering away about what happened instead of describing it. Great writers seem to describe their scenes in ways that the rest of us never would have imagined before.
Thanks for reblogging this! I think the part about one’s writing being bad will always be tough. I get so angry with myself when I read back over a paragraph and it’s clearly been written by a two-year old having a tantrum, but then again, revision is awesome. 🙂 Thank you so much for reading. Also, I LOVE that little story about the great composer. Insightful!
My pleasure :). Revision IS awesome — you can fix something but you can’t fix nothing. I’ll keep trying to dig up who that composer was.
PS, I just remember one of my favorite words, that I got from you — it’s not crap, it’s craptastic!
Craptastic is what I’m seeing today outside my window: snow. I love snow, but this winter has been the snowiest of my adult life! I’m a bit tired of shoveling. 🙂
Reblogged this on The Daily 400 and commented:
I love this and will definitely try them. Exercise is working for me already — I get ideas during yoga all the time. The first one I may try is writing something even if it sucks. I usually stop and change direction, but that’s an interesting idea. I don’t remember who it was, but there’s a story about a great composer, who was asked by an another composer how his symphonies could be so great, while his weren’t? The great composer said that the average composer considered only great ideas, while the great composer considered both good and bad ones.
I think my favorite is to give one thing close attention. I’m usually so focused on getting the scene down that I’m chattering away about what happened instead of describing it. Great writers seem to describe their scenes in ways that the rest of us never would have imagined before.