This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
1. Feed your brain. It goes without saying that writers are readers but other sources of information are important, too. Watch films and television (there’s some really good writing on TV at the moment), visit galleries and museums, go walking (Dickens used to walk for hours every afternoon), sit in a café or on the bus and watch and listen to strangers. Everything is potentially useful and ideas can come at any time.
2. If something catches your eye – a postcard, a bit of packaging, a photo, a ticket, a doodle, anything – keep it. Often these things are the seeds of future stories, even if the stories don’t come until two or three years later. Pin-boards and scrapbooks are useful.
3. Spend time on your own. It’s difficult to let your mind wander in creative ways if you’re in company. Again, walking is good for this: something about its repetitive rhythm, particularly over long distances, seems to unlock the imaginative side of the brain. Unfortunately, biscuit-eating is also a repetitive activity.
4. If you write on a computer and get stuck, switch to writing by hand and write anything, complete nonsense, until the knot in your brain comes out. Scientists have discovered a link between the motion of a hand over paper and the creative side of the brain. It sounds like hocus-pocus, but it almost always works for me.5. Write something that makes you feel excited. Novels take a long time and there are always days when organizing words into a sentence feels like trying to get an octopus into a string bag, but if you’re writing something you really care about, you’ll also have days when you feel so exhilarated that you’ll never want to do anything else.
Before We Met by Lucie Whitehouse is out now.