How To Find Inspiration

Here’s he deal: I can tell you what inspires me or I can tell you a lot of inspirational sources. It’s easy to tell you what has inspired me, but it’s almost impossible to tell you what’s going to inspire you; every writer is different and has their own different perspective and point of view on things. Because of that the stuff that you find really interesting won’t be the same thing someone else finds interesting.

So realize that just because something inspires me it may not inspire you. In fact, what inspires me could actually create a block in you. Nonetheless, let’s look at what inspires people and hope something in my approach helps you.

The Places to Find Some Gold

There are some places where everyone finds some inspiration. The first places you should try are having a conversation with someone or reading a book. You should be doing a lot of those anyway. Conversations are important because the best way to learn dialogue is to listen to what other people are saying. You also need to be reading books in the first place, not just for your own personal enlightenment and education but because it’s necessary to see what everybody else is doing and how they deal with whatever problems they encounter.

Conversations help inspire us because sometimes we get into a cool groove and start exploring things, be it philosophical questions or interesting situations. Those conversations exploring what people would do in specific situations and how they would deal with them sometimes inspire us, as writers, to see what would happen. We do that by taking the ground covered in the conversation as the starting point and go from there, and then write about the problem is solved.

Reading is always going to be a great source of inspiration, and not just fiction. Sometimes when we read we get curious about how we would handle something, if we could have done it better or explored it further. It becomes a challenge to us to do better than the other writer. Other times we will read something that arouses our sense of curiosity or sense of wonder and we feel the need to explore that. If we read an article on octopus intelligence, for example, we may be curious what an octopoid civilization would look like or even what they could create. This is why so many writers read history and science books and articles; there’s a lot of inspiration to be found there.

Some of My Inspirations

If you can find inspiration in a book then you can find inspiration in the movies, and I’m lucky in that I’m child of the 1980s; there’s a lot of great inspiration that canbe found there. One of the things you see in a lot of 1980s movies was the dreaded strip poker scene. The only problem is that you saw the beginning of the game, you saw the ending of the game, and sometimes you you saw a little bit as middle but you never actually saw the whole thing. Well, that’s what inspired me to do a strip poker script where you actually followed all the way through the entire game, and where the players actually discover something about themselves.

Remeber what I said about conversations? On a discussion board we were discussing “titles that would never be made into comics” and somebody suggested a really obnoxious title: “Sex Percussions”. I decided that this would be really cool name for something and it would eventually become the script for a web comic involving three elemental mages each of whom had power over a different element, a local forensics mage, and a hermetic mage. So you know, weirdness.

My person favorite idea is based on a throw-away concept in a role-playing rule book: It pointed out that a psychic detective would be able to put a group of supers in their place if they got out of control just by doing his job. I used that as the basis, had the collected secrets dispersed in order to distract the heroes from a crime going down, threw in a sibling rivalry, and just went with it.

And Then There’s Los Lobos Rojos….

Then there’s when you combine different sources of inspiration. “Love and Rockets” is arguably one of the best independant comics there will ever be. I sincerely love looking up anything by Los Bros Hernandez and that comic is definitely something you should try at some point. However, and this is the important part here, is that it’s grounded heavily in the Mexican origins of Los Bros Hernandez.

There’s a lot of really cool movies all about bands. So at some point it sort of clicked that I can do this really cool script about this rock and roll band that is just beginning; for some reason I decided to use “The Chipmunks Movie” because the idea of two bands going at it felt sort of natural. And I decided that certain scenes had to happen, scenes based on certain movie scenes or band stories. And then I gave it a Mexican twist. And a sweat lodge scene.

I never said you had to stick to one source of inspiration per work. If you have all sorts of ideas that may not work on their own, just throw them together and see what happens.

As you can see, you can get inspired by just about anything. Sometimes it’ll be a walk on the beach where you overhear something and that something will stick in your head until you do something about it. Sometimes you’ll read a newspaper article that hits you in the right way. So when you think you’re lost and have no idea what to write about, just step back and go do something else. You’ll be surprised just how quickly you’ll find something.

PS: Always keep a notebook on hand. Since you’re never sure when inspiration will hit, it’s always useful to have a way of recording the magic when it happens so you don’t need to recreate it later. That notebook will save a lot of frustration later on.