We’ve spent most of this week outside soaking in the sunshine. Feels like my blood has turned warm and golden, my hands still remember being plunged into dirt, my thoughts are small and slow inside the ocean of my mind, like the forget-me-nots blooming in the backyard.
So, for today’s friday fun–what is your favorite writing or creative exercise? What gets your juices flowing, what gets you in the mood to create? Do you like to write sonnets? Sketch leaves? Doodle? Play Greensleeves on the flute? 🙂
What an interesting question! Odd, but I had to think a long time about this. Finally settled on two things that get me in the mood more than anything else. 1) music, and 2) obsessions, as in I seem to want to write most when I’m obsessing over an actor or a movie or a new score. And really, it comes down to that when I’m in that obsessive state, I’m daydreaming constantly, and that mental state just seems to spin right into all sorts of creative outlets. 😀
Yesterday I discovered I get a lot of creative thinking done in the car if I’m by myself. Something about those highway miles… 😀
I’m curious about your obssessing over an actor or movie leading to more creativity… Do you end up with more original fiction or fan fiction out of it?
It’s fascinating to see how everyone’s creative processes are so different. 😀
It usually has little effect on fanfiction output, other than I’m in that heightened creative mood and that extends to wanting to do all kinds of writing, drawing, composing. Usually, when I’m obsessing/daydreaming a lot, I always get a new a novel idea (or 2, or 3) that I have to play with. You can actually chart who I was obsessed with at what time, based on what novel I wrote during that period. Though as inspiration is not readily visible in the finished product, I doubt anybody but me would know what actually inspired what book, LOL!
And driving! Driving is one of my favorite times to think, though usually I do better as a passenger. My family were never big car-talkers, so on long drives, it would be long stretches of silence where I could just watch out the window and make up stories to go with the scenery. I loved that. Nowadays, if I’m the driver, I tend not to drift too far.
Yes, I bury my inspiration’s quite deeply into my books, too. I’m mostly inspired by secondary characters and passing references in other books, and those will coalesce with all sorts of other things in my head (factoids, news articles, real life experiences) to form something quite different.