Inspiration

Inspiration is not something you can force, though it is a necessary component of the creative process. Knowing what inspires you and exposing yourself to it, can help to get inspiration flowing.

I do not actively look for inspiration but I expose myself quite often to things that I know that can inspire me. Inspiration does not come out of thin air for me. Most of the times when I get an idea, I am deep in thought and creating stories in my mind. Talking with other people about things, they can be very random and have not to be related to any kind of creativity, I get inspired as well.

 

High on my list of things that inspire me is music. Especially music with sad lyrics. I automatically start building a story around the lyrics or I try to relate to them. Sometimes I marvel at how certain emotions are described. More than once music has helped me to convert a certain emotion more clearly to ink and paper. Sometimes I come across a song that fits extremely well for a certain story/scene/character and I can listen to it over and over again without getting tired of it. But not all music inspired me. I have to like it. I am able to get most inspiration from band I really love.

The beautiful, magical northern lights serve as a great inspiration for me. One day, I hope to see them myself.
source: Google images

Nature is also a great source for ideas. Reading, especially poetry, and writing has taught me to stop rushing and enjoy the simple beauty around me. It does not have to be an incredible landscape from a faraway place. A seemingly dull tree or a bird that you see everywhere can be enough to trigger a flood of inspiration. Especially autumn is a great season for ideas for me. All the colours and the world slowly preparing for the cold and dark winter are very inspirational. The world is changing right before my eyes. It is truly incredible.

Another important thing that inspires me, are my literature classes and reading. While they do not always give me content ideas, they do, however, want me to experiment with language. Writing is not only about telling the story and how you tell it, but also about using language. Sometimes the language part is very difficult for me because I do not write in my first language. I deem myself to be a decent user of English, I know that my vocabulary is sometimes very limited. Luckily there are always dictionaries and the thesaurus to help me resolve that problem.

There are far more things that inspire me, but those mentioned above are the most important ones I can almost always fall back on. To make them work I have to more or less relaxed. They are, lucky for me, also great ways to become relaxed. But sometimes when I am stressed or very worried, it is almost impossible to relax and inspiration stays away. These states of mind do not last long and I do not allow them to meddle with my writing. There is always something to write about, even though it is about grocery shopping or walking to work. Even such simple things can make a great story if told and written well! Who knows where they might lead.

Write Because a Story Bruns Within You

“Write because a story burns within you, and you find yourself thinking and dreaming of it every free moment.” Christoper Paolini (The Inheritance cycle) tweeted this some time ago. I can very much relate to this quote. While I have written (or better said started) several stories before, nothing burned so within me as the current one does. Wanderers’ Tale saga (this is the working title of the series) that I write with a co-writer, is always on my mind every free moment. Unfortunately it tends to slip to the front of my mind when I shouldn’t be thinking about it as well.

For those who do not know, I am co-writing a story that started out as a fan fiction (we used our idols as the main characters) but we decided that the plot was interesting enough to turn into an original story. Now we are finishing off the fan fiction version and will use that as a rough outline for the original story.  We are writing this round-robin: we each take turns writing short pieces, continuing on what the other has previously written. This is a very fun way to write and explore possibilities but it also creates inconsistencies and is very very slow.
 
I do love this story a lot, especially the characters, but it is starting to become tedious. It has been dragging on for about 10 months now and we had to postpone the deadline a couple of times because we could not reach it. The latest deadline we agreed on is the end of October. While the story is coming to a close, we are not going to be able to finish it in time unless we rush. Thus we agreed to abandon the deadline and just try to get it finished as soon as possible. It is not an ideal solution, but there is not any better. This weekend I actually realised how tired I am of this method of writing. It was the first time I had not really thought about the story for more than a day. The last 9 months the story and the characters have been on my mind daily. I love plotting and creating scenes while I try to sleep, it relaxes me and helps me fall asleep. It became a habit that I finally broke this weekend. It felt good!
 
The most annoying thing of it all is that I have quite some free time and thus writing time this term, but there just is not much I can do! I could prepare some world building for the rewrite of the story though as long as my co-writer and I do not have a contract about the book(s), I am not very keen to start on it. My co-writer is very busy until the end of the year and then, when I will have a busy term, she will have more free time.
 
Waiting to be able to write something can be frustrating. I tried to start on another story, but I discovered that I could not really get into as long as Wanderers’ Tale is stuck in my head.  I suppose the only thing I can do is have patience. I am, however, not a very patient person. What makes up for that is that I do not complain easily and thus when I am frustrated, I do not show that quickly.
 
In the future I am going to try to post at least one blog a week in the weekend and write more about my personal writing and share my struggles and victories!