Writing talk: Pulling from multiple sources, inspiration, and “filling the tanks.”

I read an interview with Joss Whedon about being prolific recently and one of the things he talked about was what he called “filling the tanks.”

“I read The Killer Angels. It’s a very detailed, extraordinarily compelling account of the Battle of Gettysburg from the point of view of various people in it and it’s historical. It’s historically completely accurate, and the moment I put it down I created Firefly, because I was like, ‘I need to tell this story. I need to feel this immediacy. I so connect with that era, the Western and how tactile everything is and how every decision is life or death, and how hard it is and how just rich it is, and how all the characters are just so fascinating.’

- Joss Whedon, from coCreate.

He touches on a couple of things that I thought were really interesting and really similar to the way my own process of writing things goes. After I finish a big project like writing the first draft, or even editing a book later, I need a little break where I can just binge on things. Books, movies, TV, whatever. As long as it’s creative and has a story, as long as it’s entertaining? Gimme.

A big part of this, for me, is that multimedia-ness of it all. Reading good books is important. It’s how you learn what works and what doesn’t in writing. But watching good movies, seeing good plays, listening to good music, even, can all be just as important in refueling the tanks and getting the imagination going. I think I’ve been just as influenced by shows like Battlestar Galactica or Breaking Bad as I have been by novels. It’s not always in the same way, but it helps give a different perspective.

I bring it all up because I used to honestly feel guilty at times if I was watching a movie or doing something that wasn’t reading. Somehow, I got it into my head that it was unproductive and that I couldn’t get anything from it. I remember a friend of mine, though, telling me that rather than making it a point to read X amount of books per week, or month, or whatever, he instead made it a point to experience X amount of creative things per week. And that could be movies, or it could be comics, or it could be novels. It didn’t matter as long as it made him think and it was interesting.

That stuck with me.

I don’t know how I got so off topic–I don’t know that I really am, I guess. It’s all about filling the tanks with any good stories you can, because your brain will pull from anything and everything.

I find the bit in the article about making sure you reach outside of your genre particularly interesting in the same way. I’ve read authors say before that they don’t read in their genre at all because they just don’t get anything from it, and while I love fantasy and could never give it up, that makes sense to me. By and large I feel like I get the most, in my own writing, out of reading outside.

Reading horror and genre lit and contemporary YA and whatever else helps me think about other ways to flesh out stories.

And I guess I just think that’s cool, and I like reading that other people do the same thing. Writing can be a kind of lonely thing, but thanks to twitter and ready access to blogs and articles like the one above, it doesn’t feel so lonely at all.