What’s so good about it? Well, it’s extremely dense, for one thing. That doesn’t sound like a pleasant read, but every page is chock full of science, social commentary and insightful character actions and thoughts. In this the density does not become a slog but the reason to continue. It’s engaging and there’s something to learn on every page.

Now, when I read a good book, it’s often an inspiring thing. Many is the Stephen King or Chuck Palanuik book that’s been finished with one thought echoing round in my head, “I want to write”! But Red Mars is one novel where the mountain looks too steep. I think of just the science alone, and I cringe at the hours, days, weeks that must have been involved to get that level of detail. Then there’s the social and political commentary. While the events that take place are easy enough to dream up, it’s the detail (again) of the characters’ comments, beliefs and ideals that intimidate. Not forgetting that the book spans some thirty odd years in the lives of completely believable characters. And this is the first book in a trilogy!

Now, I do realise that this is quite a bit of whingy hand-wringing on my part. In truth (and even though it’s been quite a while since a book has affected me like this), I shrugged it off fairly quickly. There will always be someone better than you (much, much better probably. No offence), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for you and that you should give up. I’m saying “you” but I am of course referring to myself, too.

I guess I can keep it as an example of something to aspire to, even if I think I’ll never get there. An even better take home message, is that our writing is different, and should stay that way. I should not be intimidated (or even inspired) to alter my writing style in worship of another writer. I shall continue with my writing and let my style grow, not in isolation, but in its own way.

We could get a really terrifying list of books here, but let’s embrace that! What books have intimidated you, and why?

Well, here’s the thing, and I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here, but you should want to be influenced! You should expose yourself to as many voices as possible in the hope that it will help your own voice mature; you should want to be inspired by other writers’ ideas (this doesn’t mean you have to rip them off, as suggested by the comment above).

Reading others’ writing can teach us so much. Here’s a quick (and by no means exhaustive) list of things to look out for when reading:

• Structure (of whole story, of chapter, of paragraph)
• Pace
• Characterisation (how is a character put across?)
• How does the theme come across?
• Use of description (when and how much)

Okay, that really wasn’t exhaustive, but it’s the main things that I think about at the moment when I’m reading a novel (currently reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson by the way, which is amazing).

The single most important thing for me though (and feel free to disagree. That’s what commenting is for!) is you should learn what you like. What sections did you enjoy most? Why was that? Was it because of a particularly witty bit of wordplay, because it made you laugh, it got your blood pumping, you just got introduced to a new favourite character, you were intrigued, you had a plot epiphany… on and on and on. Read widely, and you can build quite an impressive list of things you like, and even better, these valuable lessons will start to infiltrate your own writing almost automatically.

You want proof? Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t give you anything rock solid. The best I can come up with is that I have observed that those people who are in the habit if reading, are more comfortable with the act of writing. I myself feel that I am a much better writer due to my enjoyment of books since childhood.

I know. Not exactly an exhaustive study under scientific conditions, is it. But it makes intuitive sense that those who read will learn something about writing from it, especially if that’s where your focus lies.

There are other reasons to read a lot, which I will probably cover in another post. In the mean time, if you would like to discuss it in more detail, the comments section beckons!

How do I do it? Well, part of it is, as I said before, reading a lot, which is good for inspiration. A lot of the time I can be reading a book and I’ll be hit by many ideas. This does NOT mean I rip them off! Some ideas I will add to some current piece of work, which may take it in some new direction, or I may formulate a new story. It doesn’t matter about the genre, or the form (though I’ve never been a particularly good poet), but I’ll store it in the background there. Or I’ll note them down. Noting things down is also an excellent idea. It may seem obvious, but if you keep a dedicated notebook for ideas, then you can leave things in there for months, and upon returning to your hastily scribbled notes, trying to decipher what you originally meant can lead to yet more ideas!

Of course the best way of generating ideas is immersing yourself in media. Read lots, listen to a lot of music, watch movies, watch TV (though stay away from soap opera’s and “reality”), just allow your brain to absorb everything you see hear, feel, smell, taste…

And don’t be afraid of writing, well, crap! Among the many half baked ideas I’ve had along the way I have a story about a guy who can move through mirrors, something about this cultist church floating on the ocean, and a story about a massive department store that you can never leave, mainly due to the ‘light bombs’ that surround the exits.

None of it is any good, but moving through the daft stuff will lead you down paths to the good stuff. So yes, write away, write anything you think of, and out of the tangle will come ideas you would never have thought of just trying to think of ideas. Read, watch, absorb, plunder and plagiarise.

But if anyone steals my mirror man idea, expect lawsuits…

For me, I like to get a mindmap of the idea done as soon as I can. I am somewhat paranoid about forgetting bits, and like to get as much juice out of an idea as I can straight away. Part of that is the assumption that if I have just had an idea, it is likely that I am in an idea-generating mood, if there is such a thing. So, I want to take advantage of it!

This is my current activity when I get an idea. Of course, I’m not always at a computer, or it’s not always convenient to open my mindmapping software. So, if there is another way of at least capturing the idea, I will do that. A note on a scrap piece of paper is even okay as long as I can do something with it later (such as type it up or mind-map it or some other electronic method of recording it). If it is quick to do, I might email it to myself for later.

Why the preoccupation with electronic stuff? Well I tend to loose bits of paper if they hang around for too long for a start. Copying and pasting is good on computers too. And, a notebook has no search, so if I want to find a note later, it’s easier on computer. But I know a lot of people prefer to take their initial notes on paper, especially in the initial idea-generating phase. This is usually for the same reason that I like using mind-mapping software – it’s easy, flows, and is much more freeform.

What do you do when you get a new idea? What methods of capture do you use? Or, do you ‘capture’ it at all? Maybe you prefer to dwell on an idea over time, and let it form before you write anything down? Please share below.

• Podcasts
• RSS aggregators
• Twitter

Now admittedly, these will take some setting up initially – there is some searching involved. However, once set up, the information comes to you. I subscribe to several science and skeptical podcasts using iTunes, and update my iPod every weekend. I now have a bank of information to absorb over the week during my walks to and from train stations to get to work. If something catches your ear, many podcasts have an associated website where they keep show notes. These normally take the form of a series of links to further research on the topic in questions.

Blogs (as you know ), are another great source of information. But wouldn’t it be great if you could access all the blogs you are interested in in one place? No problem! Every blog has an RSS feed. I forget what that stands for (tsk), but it’s basically a stripped down, information only feed of all the entries in the blog. This lets you subscribe to the feed using an RSS aggregator of some kind. This is  where you gather all your feeds into one place. A lot of the time you can order them into categories or give them tags so that you can find them more easily. Now you have access to all of them at once, and it’s easy to see what new posts have been submitted to each of these blogs while you’ve been away from your computer. It all comes to you. There are loads of RSS aggregators (or RSS readers as they are also called) out there, and chances are you’ve got one already. You can subscribe straight through the Firefox web browser for example, and the new posts will be put into a handy dropdown in your toolbar. Apple Mail also has a way of showing the blogs you’ve subscribed to in the left-hand column, beneath all of your email folders. There are loads of free ones too. Personally I use Google Reader, as it’s a web app, so is available on every computer with an internet connection (plus my iPod Touch, and even my Nintendo Wii), and it is easy to arrange feeds into categories.

To subscribe to a feed, just look for this symbol, either on the site itself, or in your browsers address bar. Depending on the reader you are using, this alone will subscribe you, or you may need to copy and paste the URL into your reader.

Twitter is perhaps not the most obvious choice, but I am loving Twitter for exactly this purpose at the moment. Twitter is a kind of microblogging service. You sign up, and get to write 140 characters about something and post it. This goes out to anyone who happens to be looking at everything coming out of Twitter, or are looking at Twitterers (‘Tweeters’? Actually, I think ‘Tweeps’ is the popular term at the moment. That may change tomorrow),  in their local area, plus it goes out to anyone following you. Following is the thing that makes Twitter powerful. There’s a whole load of people out there who are interested in the same things as you, and they’re providing links, talking about events, and responding to questions all the time. All you have to do is ‘listen’.

All this does sound like a bit of work, but it’s not nearly as much as it looks. For Twitter, start by searching for celebrities that you’re interested in, or friends that you know are on there. Don’t know who to follow, then take a look at my Twitter profile for ideas. Other than that, the whole thing kind of snowballs and feeds off itself. You only need to find two good blogs or podcasts that you like and it’s not long before you are referred to a couple more from within those posts or episodes. Believe me, you will soon have what feels like a little community of like-minded people feeding you information. And don’t forget, podcasters often have blogs and visa versa, and many of them are on Twitter too. And many of them know each other. It’s this fact that means your collection grows, but it’s brought into sharp focus when you see the conversations between the people you are following on Twitter. It’s interesting to watch in itself.

Practice

One other reason why inspiration doesn’t come easily any more might simply be that I am out of practice. It sounds odd to say you can ‘practice’ at being inspired, but as long as there are activities you can do towards something (see above), you should be able to become better at it. In theory, this means that the more you look for inspiration, the more used to this activity your brain becomes and the more automatic it becomes. The big upside of this is that even if we don’t feel inspired very often now, the more we graze on our interests, the more we will be inspired and the easier it will come.

That’s not to say you can’t do anything about it. I have quite naturally been getting more and more involved in my various interests over the last couple of years, without any particular organised intention with it helping directly with my writing. However, it was when I was brainstorming a new idea the other day that I realised two very obvious things:

1. I do still get inspired!
2. why

And it is precisely to do with gathering information about things I am interested in. So I thought it would probably be a good idea to document the means I use to gather information and how it can fit into a busy schedule.

Go and find your inspiration

There are basically two ways to start gathering information that might inspire you. You can go out and get it, and (excitingly) you can get it to come to you.

The go out and get it part is fairly obvious. If someone is interested in something, what activities might you expect them to be engaged in?

• Reading books
• Looking out for documentaries on the tv
• Buying dvds on the subject

They’re the things that immediately spring to my mind. It’s worth mentioning that this does not (and shouldn’t) be restricted just to documentary style productions. If you write science fiction for example, you might be interested in futuristic technologies, the way technology influences society and culture etc. But of course you are also interested in science fiction, and should be reading and watching it (I remember a university lecturer condemning the attitude that some novice writers have: “I don’t want to be influenced by another writers’ style,” they would protest. But why not? You have to be influenced by something – that’s a large part of inspiration, so you may as well be influenced by a writer you admire. It does not have to control the development of your own voice to write with, or the subjects you write about).

Other ways to go out and get your inspiration might be more niche. For example, you may be interested in ancient civilisations, so may visit museums often. Or you might enrol on a course that teaches you something about the subject you’re into. There are sure to be numerous other ways. So get commenting! Let’s build a list and see if we can surprise each other with things we hadn’t thought of.

A lot of these seem like research tasks, and they are. But, the point is, if you engross yourself in your interests (whether you are researching something specific or not), something may spark an unexpected idea for a story, or an article, or a song, or even just revealing a further area of research you would like to get into.

And, incidentally, don’t leave out writing here. Any resources on writing should also be on your radar.

Needless to say, this is not a practical view of inspiration, and puts any kind of creative art on a pedestal named ‘talent’, beyond the reach of normal people. Also, it seems to dismiss the notion of any hard work being involved – it just sort of happens. And yet this view of inspiration still persists, and can put some people off. You might well be inclined to believe that you’re not a creative person if you don’t possess this magical ability. You might dismiss yourself as simply not having what it takes (and this may be true if you give up so easily)!

I don’t subscribe to this kind of thinking about inspiration. Or rather I should say that I try not to. For some reason it still lurks in my mind as a kind of default definition until I force myself to remember that it is entirely unlikely that this is the case. Consider another popular view of inspiration. It comes in the form of a question, normally posed to a creative of some kind on their latest work:

“So, what inspired you to come up with this?”

The answer is never, “oh, it just popped in there, without any prior thought on the subject or anything related to it”. More likely you’ll get sentences that start something like,

“I have always been interested in…”
“lately I had been thinking a lot about such and such, and then I saw…”
“I was looking for a way to…”

In other words, they were already looking for information on the subject, or were at least paying attention to it in some way. Although I am rationalising after the fact to a degree, this is the basis for my upcoming blog entries on finding inspiration (and getting it to find you). They will be up next week and I will update this post to link to them.

It may be true for some people that ideas seem to come out of nowhere, but I would bet money that they were looking out for an idea in some fashion, even if it was subconscious. It is likely that their brain is more sensitive (naturally, or through training, witting or otherwise), to whatever stimulus is around them that might generate an idea. But it pays to be aware of how or why you get inspired, because you may be able to enhance the trait. Or, if you lose it, you will at least know how to get it back!