Challenge introduction
@sndbox started its challenge series with an aim to get to know people better. The topic for the first challenge is “The favourite place”. Let me tell you where mine is then! I realize that I’m cheating a bit, but according to my beliefs, it’s better to say the truth, than to pick just one place to “follow the rules”.
Everywhere
I’ve thought long and hard about the origin of my fruitful thoughts. What I realized is that I don’t care about WHERE I am, but rather with what I stimulate my brain. I always have a notebook with me when I travel across the city, sometimes even the laptop. Usually though when I’m working, I prefer staying home. Instead of changing places I’m changing the stimuli. My ritual is following. Usually when I want to work, I have to sleep well beforehand. Therefore I often times have “2 working periods” – first when I wake up and second after the long power nap. Everything else is dependable on the topic I have to work on, or my mood.
Inspiration
How does the inspiration come, when I stay at the same place all the time? It’s all about the stimulation. When the situation is right, I don’t need to change anything and start writing right after turning on the PC. When I struggle, I follow my “rule-of-thumb-knowledge”. I’ve been with myself for some time now, so I already got the idea what helps me and what does not in which situation. For example when I work on philosophical topic, I tend not to listen to music, because I need to permanently process the thoughts and the music would just be a disruption. Otherwise music is always good for me. When I need to be VERY imaginative and spontaneous I tend to smoke a little joint. When I feel anxiety creeping up on me because I have already spent too much time writing, beer or two help me to fight the bad feeling off for some time. In a writer’s life, situation where one has to write something one does not enjoy writing about often happens. In that case I need to be 100% sober, because otherwise I wouldn’t ever be able to finish the writing – I would just start doing something else.
I rarely do travel to places while writing. I had the biggest need to do that when I was working on the history of my world and individual races in my saga. This was so far the hardest part of my writer’s life and I had to try out everything. I was working on it in the metro, then in a park, then in a pub, during one day. I just kept on moving, catching an interesting idea here and there. What proved super important to me was double checking, or even triple checking, myself under different stimuli. When I was writing something sober and it felt boring, I would read it tomorrow again not sober and vice versa. This way the serious note of the text would be preserved, while making some of the boring parts more “readable”. The first draft is almost never the best work one can put out, so reading through it more times with alternative stimuli affecting our consciousness proved very efficient for me.
Writing is a game. Whenever you’re stuck don’t fear to experiment. Trying out different approaches to writing may help you find your hidden inspiration/skill.
