5 Great Ways To Get Inspired

As you can guess from the title, my intention for this week’s post was to write a list of the best ways to get inspired. I asked friends and peers, I asked on forums and even consulted Google. And out of all the many techniques I found, I have picked my five favourite to share with you.

However, whilst I was searching for the best way to get inspired, the most common response I encountered was that you can’t find inspiration, inspiration finds you. This obviously isn’t very helpful if you’re trying to inspire yourself to write for a deadline. But it does seem to be the case that the harder you try to find inspiration, the harder it is to find.

So this week I will give you five techniques that will help you get inspired if you are required to write something for a certain date. But my overall conclusion from the research I did for this post is that true inspiration cannot be manufactured. Rather than looking for it, you have to wait for it to find you.

You can help it along by reading a lot, paying close attention to the world around you and even trying out exercises like the ones I have suggested below. The best way to encourage inspiration is to just keep writing as much as you can (maybe you’ve noticed that it’s harder to think of story ideas when you haven’t written for a while). But true inspiration cannot be chased down. It will strike you when you least expect it. And the fiction that comes from that kind of inspiration will be the best you will ever write.

Nevertheless, if you are stuck for ideas, here are the five best techniques I found:

1. Look out of the window and write a sentence about the first thing that moves.

2. Make up a life for a random person you see on the street. This could also work with an                         image found online, but it’s often more inspirational to watch a real person living their                         day to day life.

3. Pay attention to a secondary character in a book or film and write a story from their                             perspective.

4. Free writing. For those of you who don’t know what this is, free writing is when you write                   for a certain amount of time, say five minutes, without stopping, thinking or planning. It’s                   often helpful to find a starting sentence or five words to include at some point in the free                     write to get you going. Free writes can be scary but they often turn out much better than                       you’d expect them to and can be an interesting method of idea generation.

5. Reinvent a scene from a book.

I hope some of you find this useful.

Thanks for reading.