1. Being with my other writer friends; we share or talk about our writing and I always want to go home and write after wards. Writers can be loners- we need to talk with and be around other creative writers.
2. Watching a movie with interesting characters or a theme that inspires a new storyline for me.
3. Looking at Decorating magazines-this has always been the case for me. One of my favorite things to do as a kid was to look through my mom’s decorating books and pretend that those rooms/homes belonged to someone and then I would go off into my imagination about what those people were doing and how they lived. Still today, I can glance through a decorating magazine, find a room and suddenly see characters!
4. Music- music is such a strong emotion invoker for me. When I listen to music, I see scenes for my characters and it can also stir things up visually.
5. Watching the background in movies- I spend more time looking at what is in the background in movies than I do on the characters sometimes. It goes back to looking at a room and feeling a story. I take note of the walls and what’s on them as well as the setting. Great backgrounds stir new art and story ideas for me!
6. Dreams- In my dreams, there might be a snippet of dialogue or an odd person or an odd place that stays with me after I wake up-those are always fodder for getting the juices flowing!
7. Reading works by great authors- this really helps when I feel what I am writing is dry or lacking something. I pick up a book by Barbara Kingsolver or Jane Austin or other really good writers and even after reading a few paragraphs, I’ll get an idea of what to do next with mine.
8. Imitating sentences- this is something I learned in the last workshop I attended by L. McKenna Donovan. We learned to find sentences by other good writers and to break them down and imitate them. Its not an easy thing to do, but doing this always gives me a new perspective and many times will help me move past a block.
9. Taking a bubble bath or swimming- hey, its a fact, water has negative ions and negative ions help us with our creativity! Time in water for me is transformational!  I start asking my characters whats up or I meditate and bam!-the answers are there as I relax in a mound of juicy bubbles!
10. Walking through an Art Gallery. This is pretty much a no-brainer, but I love looking at artwork in galleries if I need inspiration.
11. Watching reality shows where creativity is the theme  Shows like Project Runway and Top Chef inspire me!
12. Traveling- Going to new places always stirs my imagination. Writers and artists can write off all travel for that reason, correct?
13. Dealing with powerful emotions-this is going to be a topic for another post, but when I go through something that has powerful emotions- after I have recovered- I can use those feelings to evoke scenes or experiences for characters or even for color ideas for artwork.

Here are 13 things I’ve discovered since then.

1. Don’t try  to write alone and w/o support from other writers. You need to know the madness is OK.
2. Take a writing workshop -it’s amazing how much better and more consistent you’ll become.
3. I don’t read romance novels. I said I wasn’t writing a romance. I’m writing a romance.
4. Your characters and their world take over yours.
5. Other writing friends are invaluable.
6. When you proclaim you are a writer, you are a writer.
7. A writer sits and does the work, day in and day out.
8. On some days that works totally sucks. But that’s ok. This is one job where sucky work is ok and expected.
9. With this job, if you decide to sit and watch movies all day, its ok -its research.
10. But you can only do that once in a while, the rest of the time, you have to sit and do the work.
11. My characters tell me where the story is going and they have made me cry.
12. Yesterday, because they were talking to me, I put the phone in the garbage can. This happens a lot.
13. Family members eventually learn to recognize that look in your eyes that lets them know you are off in  your characters world and they finally stop mentioning the Psyche ward.

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