Generate Your Own Inspiration
Don’t wait for lightning to strike.
Inspiration is something fiction writers are constantly chasing, and it can seem more elusive than a winning lottery ticket, especially if you suffer from writer’s block. The good news is you don’t have to twiddle your thumbs waiting for the mythical fairy dust of inspiration to fall on you like volcanic ash from some faraway eruption. You can create your own inspiration with a few simple tricks.
Utilize Deep Boredom
Deep boredom is different from average, everyday boredom because it is extreme and prolonged. When you’re deeply bored, you experience a profound lack of stimulation from your environment. You may also be profoundly disengaged from your surroundings, even if there are stimuli present. Examples of deep boredom include standing in long lines, performing tedious tasks, or working a monotonous job.
Most people think of deep boredom as a bad thing. It can lead to feelings of restlessness and frustration, after all, so we tend to combat it by engaging with stimuli that bring an immediate dopamine hit — like TV or our smartphones.
However, deep boredom is not something that should always be avoided. For creatives, especially, it’s actually something to seek out. When your brain has no stimuli to speak of, it will try to manufacture its own. With novel writers, the stimulation your brain creates can often revolve around your plot, characters, or world.
This means when you deliberately put yourself into a situation of deep boredom, you’re creating the conditions your brain needs to engage the imagination and generate new ideas.
In my case, total sensory deprivation is its own distraction. This means that when I am trying to foster deep boredom, I utilize minimal sensory input without eliminating it entirely. Listening to the same songs while sitting in my hammock chair or porch swing does it for me.
For others, it might mean having the same show on in the background or doing a task that requires minimal thought, like dishes or sewing. Anything that gives the brain some background noise without introducing a new source of stimulation will do.
If you achieve deep boredom best when you have absolutely no stimulation, go for it. But I’d venture a guess that most people need at least some sensory input to get the most creative thinking out of their deep boredom. Anything that keeps the body busy while freeing the mind can work.
Understand Your Circadian Rhythm
Everyone has a natural sleep/wake cycle, and everyone experiences creative and cognitive peaks depending on where they are in this daily cycle. These peaks will occur at slightly different times for each individual, and most people have more than one cognitive peak during the day, with a slump occurring between each one.
Generally speaking, your circadian peak will happen around twelve hours after the midpoint of your sleep period. For example, if you went to bed at midnight and woke up at 8:00 a.m., the midpoint of your sleep period would be 4:00 a.m., making your circadian peak 4:00 p.m. One of your daily cognitive peaks may occur around the time your circadian rhythm peaks.
Most people also experience a strong cognitive peak a couple of hours after waking. Many people experience cognitive peaks or “second winds” in the evening, as well. There’s also a growing body of evidence suggesting the most intelligent and creative among us experience the strongest cognitive peaks late at night.
No matter when you experience your peak performance periods, you can take advantage of them. Keep a journal of the times when you feel most alert and energetic. Use apps like Sleep Cycle or Peak to help you figure out when your maximum mental acuity occurs. This information can give you insight into when you should be working on your creative pursuits.
Ride Your Body’s Natural Highs
Taking advantage of “good hormone days” should be obvious to many writers because of the peaks and dips in the menstrual cycle. However, the medical community and general society alike are so obsessively focused on the PMS low that almost no one ever talks about the flip side of the coin: the ovulation high.
Unfortunately (but predictably), there is not much research being done on the subject of the ovulation high that many of us experience in the middle of the menstrual cycle.
However, the scant research that is out there — as well as a mountain of anecdotal evidence from individuals — suggests that many people experience improved cognitive abilities, increased energy, and heightened creativity in the days surrounding ovulation.
In fact, the natural fluctuations in our hormone levels can help us improve our creativity for much of the month. This means knowing the days when you’ll experience “ovulation euphoria” and planning to make more time for creativity on these days can give you a huge edge as a writer.
Whenever you know your hormone cycle is going to put you at peak cognitive and creative performance, take advantage of those days and weeks. Make more time for writing. Schedule in more intentional deep boredom. The power of your brain naturally boosting its own function might just surprise you.
Prepare for a Lightning Strike
Most of the time, generating your own inspirational electricity is the best way to power your novel writing. However, sometimes a storm does build on its own, allowing bolts of inspiration to strike seemingly at random.
When real lightning strikes, an upward streamer comes up from the ground to meet the charge from the cloud. Upward streamers tend to develop in taller objects, such as towers, trees, and sometimes even the human body. In this metaphor, inspiration is the charge, and preparation is the streamer.
When you outline your plot, develop your character bible, create an ideal writing environment, and do other kinds of prep work, you’re building the lightning rod that will eventually produce the upward streamer in your mind. When that happens, inspiration will strike. It may seem random, but it happens because you created the conditions that attracted the lightning.
I can’t even begin to count the number of times I worked on the boring spreadsheet otherwise known as my character bible or typed out a bulleted chapter outline only to have a brilliant plot twist or character development pop into my head hours later. At first, I thought lightning just struck at random, and only later did I realize it did so because I was building lightning rods inside my mind.
Live in Your Fantasies
Engaging in immersive imaginative fantasies can be a controversial topic in our conformist, productivity-obsessed culture. I know I and many other creatives have had experiences where we were shamed or even punished for “wasting time on daydreams.” Some people even try to pathologize this behavior by labeling it “maladaptive.”
Sometimes, it can be easy for creative individuals to let our daydreams suck up our whole lives, but other times, the wanderings of the creative mind lead to works of tremendous depth and breadth. Often, deep, complex fantasies also keep those who have them from seeking more harmful forms of escape.
So if you have a world of fantasies in your head that you want to transfer to the page, don’t ignore them. Whatever you do, don’t suppress them out of shame or fear that they’re unproductive or purposeless. Instead, schedule time to deliberately indulge them. Utilize deep boredom to flesh them out and organize them into a cohesive narrative.
Not only can making time to engage in immersive fantasy help you build more detailed worlds. It can also offer a far superior escape from the mundane than video games or binge-watching because your worlds are personalized. They belong to you.
If anyone tells you that mentally engaging with the world and characters of your novels is “a waste of time,” or — worse still — “crazy” or “maladaptive,” just remember who else “wasted” much of their time in elaborate fantasy worlds: all your favorite fantasy and sci-fi writers. That’s who.
Bottom Line
Waiting around for inspiration to strike is a poor use of your writing time. In almost all instances, you have to manufacture your own creative spark. The good news is changing your attitude about inspiration can go a long way. Inspiration isn’t some ephemeral phenomenon dictated by external forces. It’s the product of your very own brain!
