Finding Inspiration: Bookstores

I love bookstores. There’s something so inspiring about the smell of paper, the rows of colorful covers and, simply, the diversity contained there. I love to wander bookstores looking for books I might not otherwise find out about or pick up. I record titles to look up again later at the library on my phone. Most recently this has led me to check out non-fiction such as The Skeleton Crew, The Poet and the Vampyre and Hitler’s Furies, and reminded me of books I’d wanted to look up like Bad Feminist and Dancers Among Us.

In fact, as I stood in the Boulder Bookstore on my vacation, my gaze was immediately drawn to Hitler’s Furies, since I’m working on a WWII historical. I’d recently had to step back from it because I’d discovered a historical inaccuracy that required me to move the setting and cut an entire POV thread because of it, and I hadn’t figured out what to replace it with. Seeing this book on the shelf I picked it up and skimmed, and my mind began to whirl connecting dots from my novel that were already present, but this book was filling in gaps between. I ended up buying that particular book and as I left the bookstore, already had ideas for a thread to replace the old one in its new, correct historical setting.

This happens all the time when I go in bookstores. If I just browsed online, I’d never track down most of these books since algorithms dictate what shows up on websites, usually books already selling well. I find wandering bookstores to be inspiration in a twofold manner: the way I described above where I find solutions to problems I’m currently facing, and also because finding new books keeps the well filled.

There are divergent schools of thought on whether to read within one’s genre while one is working on something or not at all, and it really is a personal preference, but I find that my interests are so varied I can’t read within only one genre whether I’m working on anything or not! So finding books I wouldn’t know about plants seeds for ideas I might never have come up with otherwise. It keeps my creativity up, my mind spinning. It fuels me.

I’ll be blogging other ways to find inspiration and keep the well filled, but this is one I recently experienced so I figured I’d lead off with it. Reading is so important as a writer, and whenever I hear a writer say they don’t have time to read or they don’t read much, I’m left flabbergasted. How do you keep on top of what’s being done in your genre? How do you improve your craft without looking at ways others do or don’t do it right? Obviously practicing yourself is important and often people will say if they spend more time reading they spend less time writing, but I believe reading is imperative to the writing craft and should be prioritized for that reason; one can always find a balance. If you only have an hour a day to work on your craft, spend twenty minutes reading and forty minutes writing, maybe. I spend most of my day reading in one form or another due to my day job as an editor and I’m careful to carve out time for personal reading because of this!

Of course, when going in the bookstore, the trick is to wander. If you zero in on your favorite section and never look anywhere else, you’ll still find new books and it will be helpful, but you may become insular. Develop other interests and at least try out other genres. Maybe you struggle with setting and checking out some travel writing can inspire how you fill out that narrative. If you write science fiction and fantasy, you should definitely be browsing the science shelves. A lot of the writing has become very accessible in that genre! Websites and magazines are the same in this regard, but I’m focusing on the specific sensation when one goes in a bookstore–that particular sense of quiet, the comforting smell. I find the very act primes my mind to get the creative juices flowing, and just looking at the rows makes me want to write, even if I don’t know what!

What inspires you?

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