The Inspiration

In the past, I’ve almost always been most inspired by music and I tend to write while listening to a specific playlist. When suffering from the occasional writer’s block, music has most often been the source of breaking the inspiration free again, providing me with solutions to the problems, and setting me off on another rush of creativity.

Recently, though, I’ve found another source of input very inspiring. Photographs. As most artists have been doing of late, I’ve started making Pinterest boards that correspond with my writing. It has become a huge source of inspiration for me, though, unlike music, the boards don’t seem to help me problem-solve, but merely help me visualize how I want to describe things and people, and to help establish the atmosphere and vibe of the story.

As an example, working on a recent fairy tale for our series, Tempting Tales with Ellora’s Cave, I found the following image incredibly inspirational, even if this castle and these swans don’t appear at all in the story. It was the magical, fairyland, unreal atmosphere that I wanted to capture.

I’ve got pin boards for Fairy Tales in general, boards for specific stories like Spanish Dancing Shoes and The Frog Prince, and boards for random and currently unplaceable inspiration.

From the Spanish Dancing Shoes board.

A potential future protagonist from the Inspiration board.

If this isn’t inspiring, I don’t know what is.

From the Frog Prince board.

Feel free to follow me at Pinterest and get a glimpse of the beautiful things I’m using to juice up my inspiration, or, heck, just for some pretty pictures.