Guest Entry by Sophie Enlil (Author of Into The Outer World)

Everything has the potential to inspire. Freedom is a blank page – you can do
absolutely anything you like with it. If you don’t like the world, you can rewrite it. If
the world pisses you off that much, you can even destroy it. Writing lets you create
worlds and even entire universes, whilst simultaneously giving you the power to
destroy them. Writers can be cruel gods to their characters, for writing can rarely be
good without some antagonistic force for the protagonist of your story to struggle
against.

Some of my best story ideas have come from dreams. I dream in gloriously
detailed technicolour. I don’t just dream about people sky-boarding on hover-boards:
I dream about princes dressed in red flight suits with yellow cloaks surfing purple
skies on opaque luminous orange hover-boards above a city of elegant skyscrapers
encapsulated in a luminous yellow transparent dome. I dream about cities sculpted
of giant spheres made with turquoise and lilac marble. I dream about sky-blue space
dragons and green fountain-pen-shaped spaceships. Everyone dreams – the trick to
a vast store of stories is to always have pen and paper close by. To write, it doesn’t
matter whether you use a 20p biro or a £2,000 laptop – all that matters is that you
always have something handy to write with. For me, my best ideas usually come
either when I’m about to drift off to sleep around 2am, or when I’ve just woken up and
have made a determined effort to remember my dreams. But everyone is different.
If watching soaps inspires you and gets your imagination working, then you should
watch lots of soaps. If poetry or nature documentaries or anime inspire you, then
you should read and/or watch more of these things. But never be afraid to try new
genres – it has been clinically proven by neuroscientists that doing something or trying
something different and new is most likely to get your imagination going. This could
mean trying a new recipe, or even something as simple as changing the order of your
daily routine.

Travelling inspires me. I am fascinated with words – you only need to know a
couple of hundred words to get by in a foreign language, and can communicate most
things with just a couple of thousand words. Yet language is the writer’s toolbox –
never be afraid to learn new words, for the better you know your native language, the
more precisely you can convey exactly what you wish to say.

Beauty inspires me. I travel because I am addicted to seeing scenes of natural
beauty in bold new contexts. You don’t have to go abroad for this – just take a train
or a bus on a daytrip to somewhere new. If there is nothing beautiful nearby, don’t be
afraid to go to the ugly places, for these too can inspire. To write well, I find it helpful
to understand both beauty and ugliness, and sometimes a strange and unexpected
beauty can be found in the ugliest places. Something as simple as a wild flower
growing in a war zone, or a derelict building with an interesting pattern of moss
growing on it. Inspiration can come from the unlikeliest sources. The key is to seek
out these sources and give them the chance to inspire you.