Ever read a book that makes you sick with envy? If you haven’t, you’re not reading enough, but that’s another post entirely. I just finished Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s an amazing book and I’m insanely jealous. Read more…
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Read. Read more…
This is never something I’ve had a problem with. I’m not saying they’re all terribly good ideas. Some are downright awful in fact. I have files full of half baked ideas, stories I’ve started and haven’t gone anywhere, characters, titles even – with no stories to go with them – but I’ve never hit a spot where I’ve thought “I’m all out of idea’s”. Read more…
Some people have to search for new ideas, or need to find ways of generating them. For a lot of people, a new idea is precious. So, what do you do to look after this delicate and valuable seed? Read more…
Following on from the last couple of posts on the nature of inspiration, and how to find inspiration, now I’ll talk about a kind of automatic inspiration. Read more…
I have mentioned that when I was still in secondary school I used to feel inspired quite a lot of the time. In fact, the majority of my current dormant ideas for stories still stem from that period of my life. Maybe it was because I was engaged in active learning (at school), or maybe it was because I had more time to pursue my interests or to muse on what I had learnt, or maybe it was just that I was a teenager and my mind was more creative then (I actually have no idea whether this might be true of teenagers, but it certainly felt like that at the time). But whatever the reason, the fact remains that it doesn’t happen automatically any more. Read more…
I’ve written a blog entry about ways to encourage inspiration. But what I have not included in that is my view of what inspiration is. I think that would be useful before any further discussion on the topic, so here it is. Read more…