It's tough to keep going when you lose inspiration or develop writer's block right in the middle of a project, I've found a few different ways to get back on track.
Could/can you imagine having a view like this? I know one of my biggest attention-distractions is my environment. I go back and forth on whether something like this would be good, or really bad.
“By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination.” - Christopher Columbus
Some people use music to keep them focused, and I've heard that it does work quite well, but it can have the opposite effect on me. If the songs have lyrics, nine times out of ten, my brain is more in tune with them rather than focusing on what I should be doing. Now if it's something I've heard hundreds of times and can push to the back of my head as background noise, then that's one thing, or if it's just instrumental music that doesn't have words at all.
Does silence work for you?
I can go either way on needing complete silence or needing some kind of background noise. There are times where it will be too quiet, to the point it almost hurts my ears. Not sure if that happens to everyone, or if I'm just weird. I live in an apartment building, so complete silence is only accomplished during a couple hours just before everyone wakes up for the day - or if I have headphones on.
Inspire Me
“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” - Robin Williams
I first started Shy Walking Shadows back in 2012, the original inspiration from it came from watching a movie with my sister. It ended up getting put down for six years, then I picked it up again out of the blue. It evolved quite a bit, characters changed, and a lot more went into it. When I first got started up, the trouble wasn't in keeping going, it was stopping. It wasn't till I was three books in that I started having trouble. My attention span kept straying. It wasn't that I had writer's block, because I had everything set that I wanted, I just either didn't have the drive or kept getting sidetracked by other stuff.
Get Inspired
I hear and see how many lose their inspiration for what they're writing and have asked how others stay with it. One of the ways I've found, is to read.
At first I was iffy about this as I didn't want what I was reading to influence my work. It wouldn't have been intentional by any means, just one of those subconscious things that I wanted to avoid. Now, I love to read, always have, so I couldn't not read for too long, so I started off small then worked my way up. I'm an avid reader, so books that are four-hundred-plus pages don't bother me as long as the story is engaging, I've even read ones that were up into the thousands of pages, and it still being one story, not multiple.
Anyway, getting sidetracked here, I found inspiration through reading others' works, not because I wanted to write what they did, but because it gave me additional ideas I could do in my worlds. The characters I would read about would remind me of ones that I left behind and wanted to interact with again.
Movies. If you couldn't tell by reading my book(s), where I make plenty of references, I love horror movies. I'm not a chick-flick kind of female, I'm all for the scary, blood, gore, and mind-screwing of those late night movies that you would always get in trouble for watching as a kid. Well, not me. I got caught once, by my grandfather, and instead of sending me to bed, he invited me over to watch it with him, and right then and there he became my horror movie buddy.
Music. I know earlier I said it worked as a wonderful distraction, but it can also work as a source of inspiration too. There was a song I found, had never heard it before in my life, yet when I did hear it, I could swear I got flashes of a children's park in my head, one I'd never seen or been to. The visual was at night, and had a very foreboding feel to it, giving me goosebumps every time I heard the song and pictured that park. Sounds pretty morbid, but in the back of my mind, the thought was there that it was a place I had died in a past life.
Now if that's not inspiration for some writing, what is?
So there you have it, the three keys I use to get in a writing mood.
One thing that happens quite often for the movies, is the idea for fan fiction. But when you really get down to it, any story featuring Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies, etc, are essentially fan fiction works. Maybe a round about way, but more or less.
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