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Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Anything Can Be Creative Inspiration

I get ideas from all over the place so that no two books really have the same spark.The vast majority of the time, it has something to do with the characters, but not always. And sometimes the blood starts pumping without any story or characters at all. Here are a couple of things I've had lately that have put my imagination in overdrive.

My guilty pleasure TV show--Ancient Aliens--always gets my brain spinning. Not with concrete ideas or stories, but just fired up imagination moments. I tell people all the time that I don't care if anything on the show is real, what matters is what it does for my imagination.

There are even weirder things that inspire creativity in some odd way. Sometimes it's just a feeling rather than mind-spinning excitement. For example, over the weekend, I saw a Mid-Century Modern home with furniture to match that period. And as I looked at the picture, I could feel this incredible optimism. Maybe that's what originally attracted me to this design trend--I can see the hope for the future, the brightness the designers must have felt to create these things/homes.

Which leads me to wonder when our view of the future changed from this 1950s, 1960s view to these dystopian apocalypses that we see everywhere now. It isn't new. This dark view of the future has been around at least since The Terminator. It makes me wonder.

And this is how creativity gets flowing: Seeing things (or hearing/sensing/smelling/touching) and the mind asking questions. Sometimes these questions lead to stories, but even if they don't, it's still a good thing because it causes ideas to flow faster when it is time to think about a story or scene or chapter.