If I ever get stumped in a story, or need to come with an idea, I head straight for the shower. It’s about the only place I can go in my apartment where I won’t be interrupted by my adorable cat demanding to be petted and cuddled. It’s a retreat. But that isn’t the only thing that makes it so ideal for writing. Something about the hot steam and water beating down on my scalp helps clear my head and chase away all the stress of the real world, giving me time to figure out where I need to go in my story from there. Maybe it’s because showering is such a necessary part of the real world that I don’t feel guilty for sitting around and doing nothing. Maybe steam is magical. I’m tempted to believe it is a mixture of the two.
Once I’ve stepped into the shower, there are usually two ways I gather ideas. In the first way, I draw from situations that happened in my life and left such an impact on me that I still remember them with startling clarity years later. These usually have a tendency to be moments of grief or embarrassment. These ideas tend to come to me unplanned and then float around in my head for months until I finally come up with a way to manipulate them into something interesting and find characters who want to tell that story and make it their own. This is how my latest NaNo novel got started back in May.
Sometimes as writers, we don’t have the luxury of thinking about an idea for months on end, nor any sudden bursts of inspiration at precisely the right moment. As a Creative Writing major with writing classes every semester, I developed a second way of gathering ideas. I learned how to force myself to come up with stories. Once again, I returned to what I knew. Rather than taking from personal experiences, I turned to my other classes for inspiration. When I took a course on Cleopatra, I wrote poetry about her life. When I was completely uninspired in one of my fiction writing classes, I turned to a play I had written years earlier and found a way to convert it into another format. The story took on new dimensions and allowed me to explore the characters in ways the play formatting had not allowed me to do. (more…)