Goodreads asked Natylie Baldwin:

How do you get inspired to write?

Natylie Baldwin For fiction, I usually will come up with a theme and a character or characters first. These are usually inspired by the issues in the world that are important to me, such as humans' tendency toward self-destructiveness (both on an individual and a collective level) and how they might redeem themselves before it is too late. These are usually related to the topics of my non-fiction writing. But there is a lot you can do with fiction that you just can't do with non-fiction. In fiction, you can explore issues with more nuance and complexity and what it is like for individual humans to wrestle with important questions in the real world as opposed to the abstract. Ultimately, I think you can reach more people through storytelling than through argumentation, facts and logic. Humans evolved to be storytellers more than debaters.

As for getting inspired for individual writing sessions, I tend to listen to music and to pick songs that put me in the mood for the particular scene I have to write or in the head of the particular character whose viewpoint I' writing from. Allowing myself time and space to daydream and access the imagination necessary for creating a story world is important as well.

flag