Young Writers Society

How do you get inspiration for your writing? You can share your thoughts and tips here.

Most of my stories start with a "What if...?" situation. Ordinary people doing unordinary things, or the reverse.

Pretty cool question, but believe it or not, it is actually pretty hard to answer. Or maybe I'm just weird.

Most of my stories have begun with a dream. At least a dozen ideas have started loosely based on dreams.

I love magazines too, especially non-fiction ones like "National Geographic". They have so many interesting articles and there is bound to be something in there that sparks my interest.

My stories generally begin with characters. I have only had a few stories in which the plot has come before the characters. Usually it is my characters are formed and then I have to create a story to fit around them, rather than a story that needs to be populated with characters.

I just majorly suggest reading as much as possible and whatever you can get your hands on. I know that just about every writing tip list will have this on there, but they are intensely serious. Another tip would be to have a small notebook with you all the time and whenever something interesting happens that you think would be cool in a book, you write it down.

~GryphonFledgling

With prose, I often get a scene in my head, a tiny piece of plot or a character and then work the novel or short story around that. For example, the joint novel between my sister and I started with a scientific theory. The initial discussion went a bit like this...

My sister - "Heather, did you know that when you throw a ball into the air, the Earth is drawn towards it because the ball has a centre of gravity that attracts that of the Earth..."

Me - "Really?" *Slightly interested tone, looks over at Claire who is reading from a physics book and then returns to own book.*

Then later when that discussion was practically forgotten, Claire came running into my room and said we should write our novel about balls. After a little confusion, we decided that it had to be a science fiction comedy about moving the Earth away from the sun by throwing self destructing balls into the air.

Poetry is slightly different though. With that, I usually think of an emotion, object or event I want to convey. When I wrote 'Our Beach' I wanted it to be about this site so I thought of a metaphor that would fit it and then worked from there, gradually building my imagery and rhythm. Or sometimes a poem will just come to be and I'll write it all down in one go then put it aside to be edited and structured later.

>.< I think my problem having too much inspiration. I keep starting a story, then being (randomly, without trying to) hit by a new idea that sounds better, then hit by another idea just as I finish writing down the second and then I can't pick between the three. =P

1) Dreams. I don't know why, and I don't question it, but all of my dreams have plots. Like just today I had a dream about a secret society of people who have to guard against the devil escaping hell through the daughters of their bloodline. ^_^ Sometimes my dreams are mix-ups of a story I just read though. =P Still, it's awesomely entertaining.

2) Pictures. I only once tired to come up with an idea from a picture out of a magazine, but it's easy for me to find inspiration by grabbing on to an image in my mind and giving it a story.

3) Words. I write a random bunch of nouns and verbs, and somehow find a plot in them. Sometimes the plot sucks, but it works.

^_^ Just a few of the ways I come up with ideas.

A lot of my stories come from my dreams. It's like a movie that plays out my story and if I like it I will write it. I also get I ideas from the most random of places. I live were it snows a lot so one day I saw a car in the snow bank and I came up with a short story about 20 pages long. Also some times I will look around my room and I have a lot of pictures of friends and my family on my wall so I will come up with a crazy story with them in it too. I manly write fiction so I can come up with very crazy situations for my characters to fall into. Also some times I will get too much and start like 5-6 different stories and never finish them so it gets hard some times.

Music, dreams, oter stories (admittedly) real life situations, this website, the shower, and when I am just lying down in bed staring at the ceiling!

Music. It's usually the only thing that gets me going.

1. Dreams. They're so weird they cannot help but be inspiring.

2. Music. Good music, a good lyric, can just spark something inside of you.

3. Driving at night, or walking at night, or just moving around at night. Biologically we are programmed to fear darkness, and if you (like me) write about things that go bump in the night, getting good and scared can really help inspire, especially when you have writers block.

4. Good conversations. Let a conversation be about a huge variety of topics, and sometimes you'll snag on something, someone will reference something, that you could picture your characters doing/saying or events that unfold around them. You can also talk to yourself, but be careful not to do that too much. It becomes a habit, you do it in public, and that is hard to explain your way out of.

5. Meditation. Light some incense, darken the room, and just sit on the floor in a lotus pose breathing in, breathing out slowly. Let your mind clear, let whatever wants to come in come in, and when you want to think of something--think only of your stories.

My ideas come from the things I already know. My inspiration comes from those ideas.

Current example:

I have a solid knowledge of theater, which led to an idea about how method acting is dangerous for your identity. Inspiration came when I realized all the things I could do with said idea.

I'm my own inspiration. How convenient.

I almost always think of endings first. Especially with my short stories, which I usually like to be particularly poignant or unsettling. I generally come up with a closing line, and then work backwards. It makes for some pretty interesting planning sessions.

Then there are other things that inspire me. My best story (in my opinion) to date was inspired by an off-handed comment my old English Lit teacher made in class one day -- that some scientists believe that love only lasts about eighteen months because it's nothing more than a bunch of weird stuff going on in your brain. That really got me thinking, and I somehow ended up with a 145K-word story about it. Go figure.

My current story, however, was based around characters. I had a whole bunch of them, all very different, just hanging out with my muse and chilling in my head, annoying me no end until I racked my brains and came up with a plot for them.

History classes are also brilliant ... though that might be because I specialise in historical fiction

Yes, history classes are dangerous places to be when devoid of ideas. Between the French Revolution and 19/20 th century Russia, my head was spinning with thoughts for a while. Then again, sometimes History class is inherently a story anyway, so yeah (no, I don't remember where I was going with that thought).

1. When I'm sitting around my room doing nothing, too bored to get up or fall asleep.

2. When I'm in history class. Hearing about how other people live makes me think of how we live.

3. People and things around me.

4. Music, other books (I think about that, and it turns into something else, which turns into something else...) and pictures.

5. As I found out yesterday, making maps.

I never get ideas from my dreams. I either have a nightmare that I'm on the bus to school but not ready for school (luckily never naked ) or I forget it.

I also have a notebook in my room where I jot down ideas randomly. I have a file on Word called Promts where I put all of the random scenes, plots, titles, characters, etc. that I come up with, since I can never think of something of the spot.

Oh, and I've never had characters come first. Good characters elude me, and take a LOT of brainpower to come up with.

Um...I'm insane???

I was trying to explain this to someone the other day, and thankfully for once they didn't look at me like I was crazy. Most people do though.

I have no idea how I get my ideas, or inspiration for my ideas. It's like having a lot of different people, events, feelings, in my mind that don't belong to me. They appear from absolutely nowhere. They plague me all the time. If I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing. I think it's something to do with having an extremely overactive brain; I can easily think about two novels simultaneously, while on a completely different train of thought at the same time, and have another completely unrelated conversation, which shows just how busy my mind is.

I can't sit down and decide how my writing will go. It goes it's own way without any control from me. I can't even make the slightest changes. If I try, it just comes out wrong. I'm always reminded by this quote:

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia-E.L.Doctorow

That's what it's like for me, anyway but that's probably just me.

TV, Books, Comics, Computer Games, Conversations, Philosophy, Politics, People, Places, Dreams, while in the Shower, and so on.

I get a lot of ideas from dreams. Dreams are awesome. Almost all my bad guys come from nightmares...which isn't so awesome, but at least I can create realistic antagonists. Inspiration for me is weird, though. I see something I enjoy - like caramel or a friend or fire - and a plot starts to develop in my head. Someone says something random and it becomes a scene in my novel. I create a new word out of the blue and it becomes a title. I'm strange.