Finding Your Writing Muse

If you write or have ever had to write, you've been there. Up against a deadline and without a topic, you search for some inspiration that will lead you to write, if not a masterpiece that will be appreciated, at least something sufficient to meet whatever goal you've set out to accomplish. Here are a few tips that will help you find that inspiration.

1. Look to your passion. You are more likely to try harder when you care about your topic. If the topic doesn't seem worthy of your passion, look for a different way to frame it.
2. Embrace chaos and give it order. Listen to everything. Be a sponge. Turning a boring topic into something you love requires creativity in pulling together disparate topics. It is through this process that genuinely unique insight can be derived.
3. Be curious. If your passion has run stale, curiosity will help you find a new one. Look to history. Look to etymology. Look to philosophy, and yes [cough - Stephen], you can even look to politics. You might be surprised at how many ways you can challenge yourself to find a unique way to frame a subject.
4. Be forgiving.  Nobody is perfect. Having high standards is fine. Allowing failure to discourage you from doing your best is not.
5. Get back up. It's not a matter of if you will fail, but how often. May your life be tempered with failures that teach you all you need to know, and may you have the fortitude to keep going in spite of them.
6. Be tenacious. Discipline will help keep you from settling for "good enough" regularly. With each attempt, even if the outcome wasn't your best, the exercise you went through to write in spite of the hurdles will help you write better next time.
   

Write about something you love. If that fails, write about something you hate, and explain what must be done to turn it into something you love. You cannot consistently write well if you don't follow the process. Thus, if you learn to love the process more than you covet the outcome -- even though your efforts are checkered with failure -- your chances of achieving your writing goals dramatically increase. - Cam Beck

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Comments

[Stephen Denny]

Cam: politics? I'd never do that. Not on a marketing blog.

Actually, to stray onto the topic, when against a writing deadline with nothing to say I've always found that complaining aloud to a sympathetic audience always helps. In my case, it's the long suffering Christine, whose half-Sicilian pragmatism usually snaps me into focus. Ideas often lie half-buried and just need a bit of kicking to unearth.

Conversation and curiousity usually do the trick.