What kind of writing prompts do other people use to help get the creative juices flowing? I tend to visualize everything I write as if it's a movie, and I usually have actors picked out for the roles of the main characters. I have their pictures saved along with images of settings to help me describe things and I also love creating mock covers for books. When I get stuck I look back at my pictures and it helps me get started again. This is the kind of thing I used to get my students to do when I was teaching English and it is so much fun!
What's really been helping me lately is creating one sentence and then writing a story from it, almost like a theme.
I just come up with ideas at random or take influence from some video or concept I have seen. I sit in a room with a pencil and several pads of paper. Stuff happens.
I'm a big music geek and I often use songs I like to develop a scene I would like to write in my head. Not using the words of the song mind you, but by picturing the music as part of the background soundtrack to a series of events I would like to string together. I'll give you an example from one of my favorite artists, Matt Good. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3tlvRdV_Xs I listen to this song and I picture a desperate man wiping the barrel of a gun in his car. As it picks up to a brisker pace I see him having hidden it in his jacket and walking down a busy sidewalk bumping in to people in his way. The song continues to gain momentum and I visualized him walking in to a tall office building and getting on an elevator alone. You'll notice at the climax there is a familliar "ding" that sounds like an elevator door opening and I associated that with my character reaching his intended floor and as the elevator doors open he comes out guns a blazin to confront my antagonists. (A Mafia cartel in this case) I got all that just from a few late night listens and I feel like when you really sit down with an artist you love you can do the same thing by associating your characters actions with the mood of the music. Heck, maybe someone just listened to that and got a whole different set of events in their mind then I did. And I hope so because I find using music to be the biggest tool in my creative process.
I agree that music is always a great inspiration. In addition to having my characters / settings all picked out I usually have the whole soundtrack planned. Now I just need to find someone who will make my books into movies!
Music is often the catalyst to my writing, especially as I write song lyrics most of the time. When I do write stories and such, it can be that a song has inspired me to create a scene with a matching mood. Many times there's nothing in particular that sets me off, I just write to write.
When I'm writing, I tend to visualize it as a movie of some sort. Since I mainly write horror novels, it helps me create the atmosphere that it needs and the emotions that the characters feel when they are in specific situations. ^^ Though I mostly let my imagination run for a while, some of the ideas do get out of hand. ^^;
I have two ways: 1. daydreaming. Almost all my stories has started from a daydream and that is how I develop the ideas before even sitting down and start to write, AND during the writing process, for almost each and every scene I go through it in my mind beforehand. 2. music. Sometimes I hear a song and the lyrics make me picture the scene like a movie was playing before my eyes, and sometimes I use that in my writing. I also listen to certain songs on purpose because I have a feeling they will evoke the feeling I'm looking for to write a specific scene.
I really struggle with prompting myself to start writing - I haven't actually written anything in about a year now ..... Sometimes at school we used to use of photo of a scenic setting, then write a descriptive peice around that. It's not very good for forming a full story though.
Sometimes I like to start from a picture - drawing, photograph, painting, anything really - and either let it inspire me, or to actively try to construct a story from the picture.
Idle time prompts stories for me. When I am driving, taking a shower or doing any thing that requires very little thinking, I start to think of things and stories start.
Well, I write movie scripts, and I have a different method of writing differently than a novel. I first figure out what I want to write about in three sentences. Next, I would build a paradigm of the story. I use the paradigm as a general outline for my movie. Then I try to define my rising action (plot point) and falling action (plot point II) of my story. It gets fun that way though. Once all that is done, I take the time to know my characters and their professional and personal lives. As the original poster said, I visualize the scenes like a movie (well, I am writing a movie, of course), and work on my first draft. In order for me to avoid writer’s block, I tend to use 3 X 5 index cards and write each scene down into general strokes, like Syd Field suggested me.
