Inspired to Write: Getting inspiration from the books we read

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. We’ve been having a lot of fun talking about the many ways we writers find inspiration in the world around us, this month—and it’s a series that I’ve found myself actually gaining a lot from, every time I sit down to write my posts for the week. 

Thus far in our series, we’ve talked about everything from traveling to the music we hear when we’re out grocery shopping, as ways to find inspiration for our writing—and this week, we’re bringing it home. Let’s talk about the super obvious ones, the ones we might think of first when we think of places to find inspiration, and the ones that for some reason we can forget to go to, in our hunt for inspiration.

Inspired to Write: Getting inspiration from the books we read

I know what you’re thinking. This is probably already one of the primary ways that you get inspiration, in the first place. And that’s a very good thing. But today, I want to focus on a single side of the coin: Fiction.

See, like it or not, there are two types of books you can get inspiration from: the fiction, and the nonfiction. There’s a treasure trove of inspiration just waiting to be found in either one, but we tend to go about finding it in very different ways—so that’s what I want to talk about, this week. If you’re like me, and you’re one of those weird writers who occasionally finds that they really don’t feel like reading, then this’ll be a really good week for you to stick around and hear what I have to say.

For those of us who write fiction books, reading fiction is about both reading for the enjoyment of it and reading for the ideas other authors have already put onto the pages of their books. It’s about us sitting down and enjoying craft, enjoying someone else’s story and seeing all the work and time and effort they put into it, yes, but really… it’s mostly about finding those elusive ideas. We need those ideas. We thrive on them. Those ideas are how we keep our own ideas going, how we keep our stories alive and our works from feeling stale or old. Those ideas… they’re a big reason of why we can’t ever fully give up reading.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that writers read, no matter what. And you’d be right, in that regard. But some of us, myself included, sometimes get into this rut, of sorts. We get into this zone where we have a pile of books to read but none of them sound interesting. We look in bookstores, but none of those books sound interesting either. We’ve even tried looking online, again with the same result. Unfortunately for us, that means we’ll eventually start to run short on ideas that come from writing—which are often some of the best ideas you can get, when it comes to writing.

So no matter what you do, whether you’re a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer, make sure you’re spending time reading fiction. Read genres other than your own, read works by authors you’ve never heard of (and probably read some classics, too). Read, even when you don’t want to read, even if all it means is that you’re looking for some ideas to add to that file of ideas locked away inside your brain.

Point is, you don’t ever want to get down to the last few pages in that file. You want that file to be filled to bursting. And the best way to do that, as a writer, is to read.

As much as I hate to say it, because, yes, I’m in one of those reading ruts right now. But it doesn’t mean I’ve stopped reading.

[love]

{Rani Divine}