Inspiration from Anywhere

INSPIRATION FROM ANYWHERE As I missed my international flight home to Houston from Trinidad today, I was suddenly struck with an inspiration. Writers can find their muse anywhere at any time. Now, you may be wondering why being stuck at a foreign airport alone with absolutely no money and no lay of the land could inspire this thought in my mind. But just think about it. I’m sitting here, computer on my lap, just tapping away at the keys. Doesn’t matter that I’m in a place completely unfamiliar to me or that I’m completely clueless as to where I’ll lay my head tonight. It’s just me and the keyboard spending some good quality time together. So while I’m here at the airport with a whole lot of nothing to do, I’d like to take these moments to give you some ideas about where you can find inspiration for your own writing. Remember back to things that made you happy in your childhood. Do you recall the first time you ever rode your bike, or the time Santa left the toy you had wanted so badly under the tree? Did you play dress up in your grandmother’s attic or sell lemonade on a hot summer day? Memories like these formed you as a person, and they are the perfect way to dig deep when you feel your writing has lost some of its meaning. Take in the scenery around you. Write about the gorgeous nature (or lack thereof) that resides around you. Watch people as they walk by – each of them unique in character and offering something special to the world. The diversity that is found in all things is a wonderful way to open your eyes (and pen) to new content. Get out. Do you ever feel stuck in the same routine? Do something different. Go somewhere different. Take a drive, go salsa dancing on a Tuesday, sit in the sand at the beach, and hike in the mountains. Simply remove yourself from the norm that is your life, and don’t act surprised when inspiration finds you out of your element. Read. Read books, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, blogs, articles, or whatever else tickles your fancy. Open your eyes to the way others interpret the world through writing, and inspiration may come right out and smack you in the face. What inspires you? We’d love to hear.

The eNotes Blog How to Read a Book a Day in2013

How to Read a Book a Day in2013 Perhaps one of your resolutions for 2013, like so many peoples, is to read more this year. Im guessing, though, that you did not set yourself the daunting task of reading a grand total of 365 books over the course of as many days. That would be crazy, right? Not according to Jeff Ryan of Slate, who proved in 2012 that such a resolution, though insane, is not impossible to achieve. While I certainly do not have plans to attempt Ryans wacky goal myself, the tactics he employed to reach that number might help anyone looking to cover more literary ground this year. Heres how he did it, how you can learn from it, and why Ryans goal might actually not have been so wacky after all For a resolution like this, Ryan had to start out with some ground rules. And no, priority No. 1 was not to lower the minimum page count of the books on his list. It was to avoid scrimping on his current duties as father, husband, and full-time job-holder. My test for this was my wife: I didn’t even tell her I was tackling a book a day until six weeks into the project. If she suspected I was slacking- dishes undone, litter box a ruin, laundry growing sentient- then I was failing my prime directive. The preference for quick reads didnt come into play until rule No. 2: Read short books. I don’t deny that 2012 was  not  the year for me to launch into  Terry Goodkind. Want some Tolstoy?  The Forged Coupon, not  War and Peace. Dont hide your YA, exercise shamelessness if you want to reach your 365 book goal. In similar fashion, if I had to point out a third rule of Ryans in this project, itd be Dont be a snob. You dont get to read 365 books in a year without padding out your reading list with a bit of light fodder. The journalists literary junk food as he calls it consisted of zombie novels, books about Old Hollywood,  Ã‚  books about video games  (I can’t play you anymore, but I can read about you!),  comedians’ memoirs,  and  essay collections. Anyone elses indulgence of guilty pleasures would easily stretch to include Young Adult books, chick lit, comic books, even erotica. Does everything you read have to be Booker-worthy? Not if the goal is simply to read and learn more, so feel free to exercise a bit of shamelessness. One of Ryans most important tactics was to read multiple books at once. If youre anything like me, youll imagine this point as being annoying; I like to give my full attention to a novel without interruption from other works, if I can manage it. But the thing about this project is that it opens your eyes to how many different things you already read simultaneously everyday, besides books, and how much extra stuff can be forsaken in order to read more literature. For instance, Ryan might in one day finish up a 1,000 page tome hed been working on for a while, approach the end of an audiobook on his drive home, and close the final chapter on a Chronicles of Narnia novel with his daughter at bedtime. Sound like the kind of multitasking youre used to? And what happens when you replace the normal go-to forms of entertainment crunching up your free time and replace them with books? What might you inadvertently give up? For Ryan it was video games, direct-to-DVD horror films (in the manner of Starship Troopers 2 and Saw V-VII), and  music, as he exclusively listened to audiobooks on his iPod. Its also not difficult to imagine how much more most of us would read were it not   for our TV addictions. To many people, some of those casualties would be unforgivable. To others, pledging to read a book a day might help to check off other resolutions we might often swear to keep but never manage to. Its this new awareness of how most of us use our free time that suddenly makes this resolution appear less impossible and more like something we already engage in: If you follow my path and read a book a day in 2013, you’ll find that you truly, truly will not be reading more than usual. Right now, you are probably reading a comparable amount to me- but you’re reading newspapers, Facebook and Twitter, and the work of the fine folks at  Slate. I let that stuff go for a year in the interest of making my quota. (Maybe that’s why I liked essay collections so much; they’re like magazines in book format.) I always dreamed that in retirement I might be able to knock off a book a day: Turns out, I didn’t have to wait. So you see, pledging to read more in 2013 doesnt have to be a futile promise. As for me, Im going to try something infinitely more manageable than 365 books and focus on six authors I always mean to read but never get around to. They are:   David Mitchell,  Haruki Murakami,  David Foster Wallace,  Jonathan Franzen, Phillip Roth, and (just for fun, because Im appalling when it comes to Russian lit knowledge) Leo Tolstoy. Do you have any literature-related resolutions planned? Perhaps youll plan to read a book a month, or even to participate in 2013s NaNoWriMo? Please, share your ideas on how to read more in a comment below. Whatever you resolve this New Years, I hope your 2013 is full of inspiring and enjoyable reads!