Man-Made Inspiration

[Minibit]

If you want to make a living in the writing industry, it is essential to learn how to create inspiration and produce material on your own. As I am sure you are aware, it can take weeks or even months for "inspiration" to strike and give you a good idea; editors and producers will not give you that time.

This thread we will be discussing things we can do to produce inspiration on our own. For some people a change of scenery can help refresh their mind and perspective, other people enjoy free writing, which is writing whatever comes into their head until something good appears. There are many ways of producing inspiration and I want to hear yours!

• Free-Writing- this means getting a blank sheet of paper or an empty word file and simply writing whatever comes into your mind, you can ramble and go on as many tangents as you want. The point is to explore ideas as they come to you and eventually come across something that will help your story
  
  
• Scene change - a change of scenery can be anything from moving to another room to going on a walk, or simply pursuing another activity for a few minutes. Sometimes all your mind needs is a different perspective
  
  
• Random generators - we have some generators here on Iwaku, and www.springhole.net has a whole page of generators specifically for writing prompts
  
  
• Get Grilled - get a helper to grill you with questions about your project; sometimes they can bring up points you didn't think of, and coming up with explanations for what's already established can open doors to the future!
  
  
• Force Writing - sit down and hammer out anything you can muster about the idea you want to write about. It doesn't matter if it's crap - that's what editing later is for. The point is to just work at it; sometimes all you have to do is have the discipline to sit down and pound it out and it gets easier as you go.
  
  
• Writing Anything - write about anything and everything. It doesn't have to be good or fun to read, the point is to just keep generating words on a subject; any subject. The TV show you're watching, what you made for dinner, who you saw today, what's on your to-do list, literally anything. You're not going to get ideas for writing when you're not thinking of writing, and the best way to keep writing active in your mind is to keep actively writing.
  
  
• Worldbuild - Sometimes you just need to switch gears off of the plot and chapters, and work on your world lore, history, culture, mapping, and other details of the setting. Sometimes you come up with something that unsticks your dead end.