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How to find writing inspiration
BY Emily Powter-Robinson
12th Sep 2024
September always has an invigorating 'back to school' energy about it. Everyone is back at their desk with a renewed drive and motivation after the summer break – it is a great time to refresh your creative goals.
We've pulled together advice from ten of the bestselling and award-winning authors that lead our online courses to help you dive into your chosen genre this autumn.
Jenny Colgan, tutor of Writing a Romance Novel
- Think about the books you absolutely love from the depths of your being. They may not be perfectly plotted: Jo should have married Laurie, for starters; it is not remotely necessary for Bridget to be in that Thai prison; and Mr Rochester is actually TERRIBLE. But what great romance books do have is authenticity; truth, heart, and a deep strong belief in the characters – the kind of belief that evinces equal belief in return from the reader that these are real people, whom you deeply love and care about. There is a way of writing by numbers, and I bet you’ve read a million books like that. But the only way you’re going to write a book that readers love, and publishers love enough to publish, is to write the book you love – as true, and as reflective of you, as we can make it.
Tessa Hadley, tutor of Writing Literary Fiction with Tessa Hadley
- An important part of finding my writing home at last was reading some new writers. I remember how hugely liberating it was for me to read Alice Munro. The ordinary fabric of daily domestic life was there on the page – and yet it was also brilliant and funny and mysterious.
I always like to have a book that I love and admire beside me when I’m writing – perhaps something by Anita Brookner or Elizabeth Bowen, or indeed Alice Munro. When my mind is slack while writing – when I feel I’m not really doing enough – I’ll look over at inspiring sentences, at a writer pushing out at experience and getting it right. I’ll look at the work of a writer who’s thrilling, potent, grasping at life and making it new. And reading this kind of truly magical work can help me to get over the threshold, when I sit down at my desk and try to move from the domestic into the space where I’m imagining my own next sentences.
Cynan Jones, tutor of Writing Short Stories
- Resist the urge to try and write stories you think might be on trend. Rather, write what truly moves you. Whether it moves you to laugh, or to shiver in fear, or to have to hold back tears.
Write because you want to write. Write without concern for whether or not your story will be published. Write because you love the process of putting one word after the other.
The main over-riding rule as you pick up your pen is the one I set for myself the very first moment I decided to write seriously: write as strongly as you can, everything else is a side-effect.
Erin Kelly, tutor of Writing a Psychological Thriller
- Make your manuscript be the one that leaps out of the slush pile for agents and publishers, and eventually into readers’ hands. The best way to do that is to hook your reader from page one, and then keep them turning the pages.
Marian Keyes, tutor of Writing Fiction with Marian Keyes
- Don’t wait for inspiration to strike.
Your book isn’t beamed into your head from outside somewhere. You must build it. Writing is a job and you must have a routine.
There is always work to be done, and your book won’t get written if you don’t sit down and write it. Most days I don’t have inspiration but I still show up at my desk. If I don’t have a great idea for the next scene I have to write, I can go over what I’ve written the previous day and make it better. Or I can do messy jottings about a scene that I might write sometime in the future.
Vaseem Khan, tutor of Writing Crime Fiction
- The single biggest challenge that any crime writer faces is in dreaming up a character different enough from everything that has gone before to capture the imagination of readers and publishers alike. I’m careful not to use the word ‘unique’. It’s a word that’s bandied about too often. Just as it’s almost impossible to come up with a plot that is entirely unique, it’s equally difficult to come up with a character that isn’t at least a little bit derivative. The trick is to find some qualities that make your character stand out from the slush pile.
Kate Mosse, tutor of Writing Fiction with Kate Mosse
- Landscape as character.
For me, the land holds the story. It’s not just a backdrop – it becomes a character in its own right. You will not be surprised to hear that one of my favourite novels is Wuthering Heights, which I see as the great landscape novel. In some of the novels by the great Willa Cather, such as My Ántonia or O Pioneers!, the lead character is the great Midwest.
The key to bringing the landscape to life on the page, and making it real for the reader, is detail. Instead of thinking, the leaves are green – I’ll instead be thinking, the leaves on the olive tree have a silver underside.
David Nicholls, tutor of Writing Fiction with David Nicholls
- A novel is something which never happened (and, in the case of fantasy, something that could never happen) but which nevertheless feels true, thanks to the skill and technique of the writer. Writing what you know doesn’t mean writing memoir – more it’s about writing what feels important to you. Passion, urgency, the desire to tell a particular story in a unique way will keep you going.
Write about what preoccupies you; what feels urgent. Ask yourself the question, What do I need to say? Do all writers write the same story over and over again? Perhaps, but if you can find a new way to tell it each time, then that’s fine.
S J Parris, tutor of Writing Historical Fiction
- One of the biggest obstacles to the would-be historical novelist is the fear of not being a ‘proper’ historian. I felt quite intimidated by this when I first conceived the idea for my historical series featuring the sixteenth-century heretic philosopher Giordano Bruno. I worried that the gaps in my knowledge of history would make me look like a fraud.
You don’t need a PhD in history to cultivate that kind of curiosity about the past (though if you have one – respect!). Fiction can fill in the gaps in the historical record where historians run out of evidence, and as long as your understanding of the period is solid enough to make your reader feel they’re in safe hands, you can do what a ‘proper’ historian is not permitted to do – imagine your way into those blank spaces.
Cathy Rentzenbrink, tutor of Writing a Memoir
- Life isn’t a smooth narrative. It’s made up of events, preoccupations and stories. Some people have a central event or issue that is very important to them.
But more often, when starting out, people are inclined to feel confused about what to write and where to start.
For many of us, our life stories can feel like an octopus, with loads of tentacles wriggling around, some fatter than others, some newer than others. We need to work out how to wrestle the octopus so we can tame it onto the page. It’s a really big job, but the important thing is just to get some words on paper and then you can start seeing patterns.
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