Where do you get your writing inspiration? Imagine a cocktail hour with this group… “Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” -Marilyn Monroe “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.” -Oscar Wilde “Have no fear of perfection; you’ll never reach it…. Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood.” -Marie Curie “Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.” -George Carlin “Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.” -William Arthur Ward “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” -Dorothy Parker “Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” -John F. Kennedy “Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.” -Alfred Hitchcock “There are only two forces that unite men – fear and interest.” -Napoleon Bonaparte “Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind.” -Mick Jagger “Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” -Jack Kerouac “If I stop to kick every barking dog I am not going to get where I’m going.” -Jackie Joyner-Kersee “The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero Sometimes “writing inspiration” looks and sounds like something else. For instance, do you remember your dreams? “I dream my painting and I paint my dream.” -Vincent van Gogh The things that make you write well aren’t always neat and clean grammar lessons and quotes about writing from famous dead writers (although I did include a few above, not because of their dead writer status but because of what they said). Although if you get your writing advice and inspiration exclusively from dead writers, you might find yourself writing like a dead writer. In addition to collecting interesting ideas from public figures, the pages of history and the arts, spying is also a valuable weapon for your creativity arsenal. Some of my best writing inspiration comes from people watching and exploring everyday life, especially noticing the little things that others miss. We writers are funny like that aren’t we? “It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. Right? And this [plastic] bag was just dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes…. Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it…” -American Beauty Looking for things to write about? Get out there, go rogue and random from the things you usually do in your spare time, and soak up all the layers of life around you like a wet cloth. Then wring it out and see what stories and ideas emerge about yourself or others. “Where’s your will to be weird?” -Jim Morrison |
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