Goodreads asked Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg:

How do you get inspired to write?

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg One useful trick for me is to read research papers. On writing days, I will often start my morning by reading a research paper as I'm having breakfast - which often makes me think new thoughts about the topic. I find it energizing to spot a new insight, which makes me want to try to capture it in writing straight away. To me, writing is thinking - or rather, it's a highly precise way of thinking that forces you to be rigorous.

Generally, there's lots of gold nuggets hidden in the primary research, once you go beyond the popular books on a topic. For instance, check out academic-textbook entries on your topic, and then delve into the bibliography in the back to get a sense of who the primary researchers are in a field. Read their papers, and read things in adjacent spaces too that catch your eye.

A second part - especially for my second book, "What's Your Problem?" - was to play with the format, including using hand-drawn graphics. After writing my first book, I started finding it really dreary and deadening to write in Word. So I wrote the manuscript in Adobe InDesign instead, which allowed me to add drawings at once and get a feel for the final layout of the book. That gave me a good deal of energy as well.

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