Goodreads asked Rachel E. Pollock:

How do you get inspired to write?

Rachel E. Pollock I feel like there are two aspects to writing: inspiration and discipline. I'm not always inspired when i sit down to write, but i often just do it anyway. This is a practice which I really became attached to in graduate school, when i was working full time on top of my studies. I'd work a full day, and then i'd have a couple hours each evening to respond to my classmates' work from workshops, and I spent a good chunk of my Saturdays and Sundays writing my own submissions for class assignments. It didn't matter if i wasn't feeling any sort of driving inspiration on those days--it was the time i had to write, and i HAD to write, so i did.

That said, i find that going for a walk generally does result in inspirational flights of imagination. If i'm stuck on where to take something or how to write myself out of a corner, i go for a walk and that usually does it. I should probably dig up some kind of useful voice-recording app for getting down those inspirations, but what i actually do is call myself and leave a message on Google Voice.

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