How to Learn the Skill of Being Inspired

A writer’s biggest problem is how to find inspiration. Once you have a subject, a character, or a circumstance that fascinates you, it’s all anyone can do to keep you from rushing to the blank page and scribbling away like mad.

Writing with inspiration is easy. Finding inspiration can be one of the hardest things in the world.

One of the reasons for the elusive nature of inspiration is that we expect finding inspiration to be effortless. More than effortless – we expect it to be nearly magical. One day we’ll open the drapes and look out on the street and there, walking in front of us, will be the character around which our next great novel will revolve.

Or we’ll be sitting at a coffee shop one day and inspiration will hit us, suddenly, like a bolt of lightning. All at once, we’ll know exactly what we should be writing about.

Inspiration does sometimes happen this way, but this is a little bit like saying you shouldn’t have to go grocery shopping just because a friend of yours occasionally stops by with pizza.

Sure, sometimes inspiration happens unexpectedly, at just the right time and in just the right place. Most of the time, writers have to go looking for it. And we have to have the skills to recognize where to find it.

Explore New Experiences

I know many aspiring writers who sit around the house all day by themselves, trying to think of new things to write about. Whenever they’re invited to do something new and exciting, they say, “Thanks, but I have to work on some writing.”
These same people are constantly in distress because they can’t find the inspiration to make their writing flow easily.

The last few times I was struck with sudden inspiration, it was because I was doing something new, something I hadn’t experienced before. At the very least, it was something I hadn’t experienced in quite awhile. The new experience forced me to look at the world in a slightly different way. From that, I got an idea.

That’s inspiration.

Go ice fishing. Attend an art opening. Check out a rodeo. Visit some of the tourist attractions in your area that you’ve always known about but had never bothered to visit. Go on a walk by yourself with no music and no particular idea where you’re headed.

Then pay very close attention to every single thing that happens.

Ask People about Themselves

One of the common failings I notice in writers is that they only want to write about themselves. Sure, writers are all told to ‘write what you know’, but no one ever said, ‘write what you know about yourself’. Your work will be seriously one-dimensional if all it is are simply variations of you and your experiences.

In order to find out how other people think and to get inspiration for new material, new characters, new ways of looking at the world, you need to know what people think and do and believe in. The only way to get that information is to ask them.

Pay attention. It’s very hard for us to listen to another person without jumping in with our own anecdotes. It’s a natural human response to demonstrate, “Hey, I’m just like you!” Resist that impulse, if only for the reason that you’re interested in what makes you two different from each other.

Think about that. If you like, start discussing your differences with this person. He may be able to expand on a viewpoint to the extent that you really feel you understand it. The next time you’re crafting a new character, you’ll think of all those viewpoints and one of them will ring true to you.

Bring a Notebook

Ever see a writer look very distant, very suddenly? It happens a lot among the creative crowd, and it’s usually because they just had a wayward thought about a possible idea. Mostly, they’ll try to remember it long enough to write it down later, but later comes after dinner and conversation and drinks, and they can never quite dredge up exactly what made that idea so wonderful.

That’s if they remember the idea in the first place.

Bring a notebook everywhere you go, especially when you’re exploring new sources of inspiration, because it’s you’ll likely have a flash of a great sentence or a scene or a just-right metaphor. You’ll want to catch that idea while it’s still fresh.

Later, when you lack inspiration, open up that notebook and browse through some of those brief moments of brilliance. I guarantee you that you’ll find what you’re looking for.

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