Finding Inspiration for Writing

Right now, here in western Oregon, there is a light rain falling. It'll rain for days -- a prelude to the coming winter months (which I call "the rainy season", which takes up at least a third of the year here). Though I like summer for its outdoor activities, I like the rain. It stimulates the writer in me. The pitter-pat of drops on the roof somehow activates my creative side (not to mention that I am no longer drawn toward outdoor distractions). I also keep a Pinterest site with images I find inspirational for creating my Strange Worlds (see them HERE, and please follow!).

The other day I ran a Twitter poll, trying to get an idea of where writers find inspiration for their writing.  Here's the poll and its results:

#Writingcommunity, which of these do you find most inspiring for writing?

(please also leave a comment to specify)#amwriting #amediting

— Strange Worlds of Jason Kilgore (@WorldsKilgore) September 9, 2019

Of those options, clearly music was number one. This was surprising to me. Quite often I hear writers saying that they need complete silence to do their writing. I know I can't write when I'm listening to music. But not everyone is the same, of course.

But sometimes I, too, like to listen to music BEFORE writing, to put me in a particular mood. Something adventurous for fantasy, for instance, or techno before writing sci fi. Often I tend to associate one particular song with one book, but the funny thing is that it usually isn't anything you'd associate with the plot or even the genre. For instance, for the fantasy novel I'm currently querying, White Lands Dragon, I often listened to R.E.M.'s "Texarkana" (it makes me think of eons of time). For my first fantasy novel, Chronicles of a Warrior: Death's Foreplay, I would listen to Marilyn Manson's "Disposable Teens" (probably because the main character is a teen boy who is being used as a spy, and angry about it). Neither of these songs is Medieval-sounding in the slightest, so you wouldn't think they'd work for fantasy books, but I'll take inspiration where I can find it.

The web is full of pages of how to get inspired for writing, so I'm not going to go into it all. But there's some good stuff there. For instance, THIS PAGE about how 50 well-known writers find inspiration, or THIS PAGE which has some ... unusual ... advice (99, to be exact). And, of course, there's a WikiHow page (isn't there for every process?).

But because writing is an art, and the artistic mind is unique to each person and each project, there are infinite sources of inspiration. And we "creatives" have a lot of equally creative ways to inspire ourselves.

What inspires you to create? Please leave a comment....

Cheers and happy reading!