Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Sources of Inspiration

Mostly I draw my inspiration from words.  Bits of overheard conversations, phrases read in books or on blogs, pieces of lyrics... certain words or phrases just explode into my mind, bringing an image or emotion that sticks there, fully formed, the moment I've processed the words.

So most of my sources for inspiration are things with words.  If I'm finding myself getting stuck in a creative project and need some inspiration, I'll grab a book or pull up one of my favourite blogs, or else I'll stick my headphones in and listen to some music.  I find that new music or things that I haven't listened to for a really long time tend to work the best.

I also like things that generate random words.  Seeds is a really good one.  There's also this site, which rehashes old tweets into new tweets - most of the time they're useless nonsense, but every now and then they'll actually fit together as a sentence, and sometimes they're brilliant.  I especially like this one because I can use my own previously-boring words to come up with phrases that inspire interesting ideas for me.

Speaking of twitter, I also get inspiration from Sarah Selecky.  She's an author who wrote a brilliant book of short stories called This Cake is for the Party which I read last summer (it is wonderful, I recommend it).  She tweets daily writing prompts, and although I don't usually have time to do many of them, sometimes not even her exact prompt but some image or thought that conjures for me can be really helpful as inspiration.

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