Today marks the first day of my blog actually containing information other than my name. I’m sure you’re all as excited as I am about this, but let me just cut to the point: I have no inspiration.
Actually, let me rephrase that for you. I had no inspiration.
I’ve come up with random ideas, random writings, random thoughts… pretty much ‘random’ everything. It wasn’t until sometime today that I actually was stricken with the creative parasite known as inspiration; more specifically, an inspiration to actually do something.
Which brings us to the topic of today’s post: Where can inspiration come from, what you can do with it, what you should do with it, and above all, how much money can you make with it!
I’m only half-joking about that last bit, but let’s not fool ourselves. If you’re here, you want to be a writer. Whether or not you want to be a professional writer is not necessarily in question. Screenwriter Peter Briggs once said in an interview I was present for, “I prefer to call myself a paid amateur screenwriter.” This is because, by definition, a professional is someone who participates in an activity for livelihood or gain; whereas an amateur is one who engages in that activity as a pastime rather than a profession. The sad truth is that we need money to survive and we need to do things we love to keep our sanity. Let’s shoot for killing two birds with one stone, shall we?
But in order for your shot to have any accuracy in the writing field, you will need inspiration. A writer with writer’s block is worse than a pugilist with no hands: at least kickboxing is still popular. So where can your inspiration come from? Well, I strongly recommend that you read. Read newspapers, internet sites, and blogs or periodicals. Read good books. Read great books. Read bad books. Hell, please read the horrible ones too! You’ll learn what works, doesn’t work, what you like, what you don’t like, and a number of other things. There are copyright laws, sure, but borrowing elements from things you like, or removing elements that you caught yourself doing, aren’t in violation of any laws that I’m aware of. Otherwise, your editor or publisher can catch that. On that note…
Be your own editor! I know editing work is not for everyone, but it definitely can help refine your abilities as a writer. Let’s say you’ve started a work of your own, and you’re quite pleased with it. Try to find a similar novel (I can almost guarantee you that one exists.) If there are parts in that book that have you mocking it, or wondering why it was published to begin with, try to see if that is present in any form in your own work. While you’re reading other books, you just might catch some sort of essence that you want to build upon. This can definitely spearhead any personal project you’re working on, or turn into a new one altogether!
Fostering your own personal writing projects is very important to your future career as a writer. I can almost guarantee you with certainty that any position or freelance work that comes across your plate will require at the very least a portfolio. Build yours up with your side projects. It doesn’t matter if they’re finished, works in progress, scrapped for lack of direction after you spent months developing the main character. The work you spent on that main character is evident in whatever scraps that you have about it. That is work. That is writing. That is proof.
That proof shows your ability. If you get even a small amount of inspiration, just for a character even, put it down on paper. Put it on a media disc. Just please, save it somehow. It will come in handy when your future boss asks for samples of your work before they commit you to a writing project and you say, “I have ideas.” Turn that inspiration into proof. You owe it to yourself and to your characters, settings, plots, themes, villains, heroes… you get the idea.
If all else fails, you can start a weblog and hope that Google Ads will supplement your monotonous bi-weekly income nicely.
Until next time,
AJ.
