A Wolf with Feathers

Inspiration is a very personal thing. I can't possibly tell you where to get ideas from or what will inspire you. All I can talk about is what inspires me and hope that something will click for you or at least give you an idea of where you can go and look to find your own inspiration.



For someone who cannot write at home when there are other people in the room, I get a lot of my inspiration from people watching. I like writing in cafés and on trains and when surrounded by complete strangers. I love sitting by the windows of a café, especially one in a busy shopping centre and watching people go by. Sometimes I'll see someone and want to write about them or I'll see a moment of interaction between two people and elaborate on it. sometimes it's just the atmosphere of being surrounded by the bustle of a crowd while being slightly apart from it that gets my pen moving over the paper. Currently, I'm stuck at home due to the ice, so that's not exactly a feasible method of finding inspiration and I need to look elsewhere.

As most people who know me will tell you, I get ideas from the oddest places, but here are some of my favourite ways of finding inspiration -

• Prompts - the fact I'm doing a daily prompt on here should tell you that I love prompts! I am committed to far more prompt based challenges than any one person should be, but I love them.
• Brainstorming - this follows on from the prompts. One of the ways I love for generating ideas is to write the prompt in the middle of a piece of paper (or on the computer) and then write down whatever comes into my head when I think of it, with the ideas all branching off from the original prompt. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you, it's about finding ideas, not being able to justify why the prompt gave you that idea to other people. I find the images I come up with from that usually result in at least one workable idea.
• Reading - books, newspapers, magazines, blogs. Just read. Obviously you can't steal other people's ideas, but something they said in their story or an event you saw in the newspaper might spark something in your own brain.
• Go for a walk - I find that letting my mind drift as I walk the dog sometimes ends up in a brand new idea or gets me past a block in something I'm already working on.
• History - as I'm an historian, this shouldn't be a big surprise, but I get a lot of my ideas from history. Sometimes that means ideas for historical fiction, but there's plenty of material that can be transferred into other genres, especially science fiction or fantasy.
• Images - look through on-line image sites or through art galleries or photographic archives and see if something sparks your imagination. Currently I have a picture from a computer game of a post-apocalyptic London on one netbook as inspiration and a rather atmospheric photograph of Stonehenge on the other one.

And now for the links section of the post.

Photographic Prompts - a new prompt every day.
Sunday Scribblings - weekly prompts
Random Line Generator - comes up with a series of words that usually make a kind of poetic gibberish. Very inspiring.
Character Name Database - sometimes just a name can make a character spring to life.
Urban Decay - photographs of buildings, statues, etc.. I know I find these inspiring.
Getty Images - One of the largest archives of stock images on the web.
Kinks, Tropes, and Clichés - try using one of these and making it your own.
Questions for World Building - I think I linked to this on Monday as well, but it's a great way to get inspired. Just start answering the questions and see if your world can grow into a living, breathing thing.
Stupid plot tricks - does exactly what it says on the tin.
Straight Dope - the sheer amount of information here should inspire something (and if it doesn't it'll certainly kill some time!).