Inspiration and the future (mine, and everyone else’s)

Inspiration isn’t something that always turns up on demand. For a person attempting to work creatively this can be a bit of an issue. It’s certainly the case that trying to create can be a way of inviting inspiration to come to you. If you aren’t making room for inspiration to happen, it’s not so likely to show up. Time contemplating can also work. Getting on with life and hoping inspiration will strike isn’t very effective at all.

My major source of inspiration has always been other people. That can work in a number of ways. Sometimes I get very excited about a person and that fills my head with ideas and makes me want to write. Some of the things I’ve written have been for specific people – that can mean writing blog posts on request, writing poems for people. I wrote my most recent book – Beyond Sustainability, because my lovely publisher Trevor Greenfield asked me to. There’s nothing like someone wanting something from me to get me motivated and inspired.

Sometimes I write for groups of people. I write this blog because I know there are people reading it, and that’s a reason to keep finding topics and ideas day by day. One of the ways in which I find Patreon helpful is the accountability of having people to write for. At times when I’ve been struggling creatively, knowing that I need to produce things for my Patreon supporters has given me much needed focus, and that often opens the way to inspiration.

There are a handful of people who are always on my mind when I’m writing fiction. People who I know like my stuff and who I would like to be able to engage and entertain. Thinking about what they’d enjoy and wanting to create books for them to enjoy is important to my being able to do what I do.

When I was first writing, as a much younger human, a lot of my inspiration came out of my hopes and daydreams. As is always the way for young humans, I didn’t have much experience to draw on, and found a lot of my writing ideas in what might happen. Writing from a place of hope is different from writing from a place of experience. At this point in my writing I think I’m on the edge of a significant change. I need to dream more, but instead of trying to dream my own future, I need to dream a future that I can engage more people with. Unlike younger me, I’m not interested in my own trajectory much – certainly not as a source of writing ideas. I am deeply concerned with the trajectory of humanity as a whole. So I think that moving forward I’ll be doing more to combine younger me’s hope and future-facing ideas with older me’s interest in writing primarily for other people, and see where that takes me.