Tag: inspiration

GET UP, GO OUT!

nottinghamcreativewritinghub

Leah Jackson, a first-year BA Creative Writing student, went to Paris and Florence, and came back full of ideas.

Many writers tend to struggle with ‘writer’s block’ – it is even the subject of a recent post on this blog. This term may be used when a writer feels lost and insecure in their ideas and projects because of a lack of motivation and inspiration. However, I believe this need never be permanent, as I have discovered a way to combat it: go and see something new, if you can!

Throughout 2023, I was very grateful to find myself experiencing lots of opportunities to travel. I visited Paris with my college friends in February, and saved up my money to visit Florence for a week in December with a close family member. Every time I was traveling to a new area, I noticed my inspiration was like a bouncy ball of energy in my head, whizzing around full of creative ideas. I had never received that kind of inspiration when staying in my safe university hall bedroom). Breaking out of my comfort zone filled me with refreshing and exciting ideas I would never otherwise have added to my writing journal. Not only that, but it was also helpful to my research for my writing.

When I travelled to Paris, I was captivated by the beautiful city and the fashionable people I walked past. The architecture was extravagant compared to what I was used to. I found myself writing a lot of thoughts down in my journal during my time there. The building in this photo got me thinking creatively: I wondered whether this was an apartment building, and if so, who might live there? Is that person good? What is their occupation? Do they ever leave the building?

I hadn’t travelled outside of the UK since the age of eight, and I remember being scared at first to leave the country without my family. However, I soon found that it transformed my mind to become more flexible, adventurous and open to understanding other ways of living, and I wasn’t scared anymore, just eager to explore. Writing in an unfamiliar but gorgeous city helped me to sharpen my storytelling skills and experiment with unique characters based on strangers I met or observed. Looking back, these characters were the most authentic and unique I had ever written. Writing had become exciting again.

I had been most comfortable writing scripts in the genre of dark comedy. However, when traveling to Florence, I found my new love for writing romance when seeing the historical sculptures and magnificent Florentine buildings. I had never found these types of romantic ideas before anywhere else.  The famous historical geniuses that had built and lived in the breathtaking city also left me questioning what life may have been like here during the Renaissance.

My mind was full of curiosities. Did Leonardo Da Vinci used to sit where I am sitting and think about his next painting? What was Michelangelo thinking when sculpting his famous David? Was it painful work? What was it like to be a member of the Medici family – or one of their servants? Thinking about this made me realize history can also provide a lot of inspiration. Traveling to Florence helped me to gain inspiration for characters and experiment with a new genre I had never tried writing in before.

If you ever find yourself lost for ideas, then, I strongly recommend pushing yourself to break your comfort zone, to widen your mind to what the outside world has to offer. This doesn’t have to involve traveling abroad – it could be going for a walk to your local cafe or nearby forest, traveling to a part of your country you’ve never visited before, or going out of your way to meet new people you would never find in your usual friendship group. By doing this you are improving your writing skills with new knowledge. If you are in Nottingham, you have wonderful places to explore all around you. Getting yourself out there, whether it is your back garden or another country, can always help refresh those creative thoughts and stave off the dreaded ‘writer’s block’.

Here are some tips that can help you keep these new special ideas safe:

  • Always carry a pocket or bag-friendly notebook with you, I usually carry around an A5 journal and this can fit in my small satchel bag! This makes it easier to travel with.
  • Always bring a pencil or a pen. If you would like to make it more fun, some colourful highlighters or different coloured gel pens, stickers and washing tapes can be used to spice up your pages in your writing journal. (This can also make the ideas more memorable for you!)
  • A small laptop or iPad can also be used if you prefer to type up your ideas instead of writing them traditionally. I prefer the latter, but we’re all different.
  • If you do ever find yourself having a boost of inspiration and you happen to have forgotten your notebook and stationery, you can obviously also use your phone’s ‘Notes’ app, and jot them down in your journal later.
  • Buy yourself a professional camera or use your phone camera to capture whatever inspires you! Then you can always come back to that photo and brainstorm even more ideas. The photos in this blog post have mostly been taken on my recent travels. Using photography to boost inspiration can also be effective.

A student writer in lockdown

nottinghamcreativewritinghub

JOHN ROGERS

Learning the craft is hard. Voice. Characterisation. Setting. Pace. All these skills must come together, push back against one another with enough resistance. Getting these forces to align is thrilling. Frustrating, excruciating even. But thrilling, nonetheless.

Unfortunately, there are forces beyond the student writer’s control. They turn up as uninvited callers, knocking at the door with heavy fists. They call themselves ‘Stressors’ and, if you don’t open up, they’ll force entry. More often than not then, front door handles get depressed. The stressors burst in with muddy boots. They walk all over the new cream carpet.

Should a writer wish to use these immediate stressors to inspire their writing, they are more than welcome to. But what happens when the world is gripped by one shared stressor, when all and sundry are plunged into lockdown? What does one write about? What does it matter?

For the more fortunate student community, the pandemic may feel more of a distant threat than other life stressors. Hopefully, no-one they know has been directly affected by this brutal virus. But even if the immediate effects remain at arm’s length, students do themselves a disservice should they say that they’re unaffected. They will soon be caught between graduand and graduate status, perhaps remaining in social distancing limbo until a vaccine is found. Anxiety bubbles, and the student writer isn’t exempt from feeling this intense pressure.

‘What you been doing?’ asks a Zoom user.

‘Not a lot. I’ve written a new poem,’ the student writer says, while cursing the third video call of the day. These started in the afternoon, slipped into evening and now infiltrate the night.

‘Oh right,’ feigning interest. ‘Just one?’

‘Yeah, I’ll do more tomorrow,’ a pledge made to the keyworkers who are working flat out, while the student writer scrapes together a few words for submission. In this context, writing seems to pale into insignificance, and that only increases the pressure to offer a more sizeable contribution.

x.

As one of the student writing community, I’m fortunate to have a release from this pressure. I have a greenhouse to escape to. Or one I’ve commandeered, at least. Every afternoon (sometime after three), I flee the confines of one space (the house) to be held by the limits of another. But there is an important distinction. The greenhouse has become my space, my thinking pod and, occasionally, my writing shed. I sit in a wearied patio chair, almost holidaying with ‘Runner Bean x’ immediately to my right. It looks as though the tray of them is blowing me a kiss, but on closer inspection the x is there to denote the number being grown. The soil level disguises how many companions I’ll have next week but, for now, six have poked their heads into the world. I sometimes think about how future novels, poems, scripts will be affected by lockdown, but more often than not I leave those thoughts at the threshold. Inside, I tend to study the runner beans, the hopeful tomato plants, the early signs of courgettes, and admire how they’re busy growing in spite of the pandemic. And the pressure eases somewhat.

There will be others who don’t have the luxury of a greenhouse. Don’t have a garden. Are isolating alone. Seem to have no escape. But a Douglas Dunn poem reminded me of the hope that we can find in humanity’s fierce spirit. Taken from a series of observations made about the lives of Hull residents, Dunn writes in ‘A Removal from Terry Street’ that a man comes out of a house ‘pushing, of all things, a lawnmower. / There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms / Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight. / That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.’ The poem may have been published in the late-sixties but it still resonates. Putting aside one reading that points to the imbalance of wealth and materialism, the man emerging from his front door with a ‘lawnmower’ (despite both his and the family’s anxieties) is spectacular. He might not have been able to use it on Terry Street but hope springs eternal. He’ll carry/lug/wheel it until he finds grass and the freedom it brings. He is resilient. He won’t be beaten.

Looking for inspiration.

The time is 16:09. I’ve resumed my privileged position. My knowledge of runner beans is modest at best. I don’t even particularly like them. And my writing output is equally modest. But I’m not going to worry about that today. I’m going to be thankful for the thinking-pod-writing-shed-greenhouse and remind myself that’s it okay to sit. I enjoy staring through its clear skylight windows. And I hope the man with the lawnmower finds comfort. I believe that he can find release.

John Rogers is a student on the MA Creative Writing at NTU.