GP: How you get your creative ideas by Pearl R Meaker

This week’s guest post is my friend and author, the lovely Pearl R Meaker.  Yes, Pearl has once again agreed to write for my blog and I love having her here.  Enjoy!

Hi!  It’s nice to be sharing a bit of something with you today.

Ari wisely provides guidelines for her guest posters which includes a list of nine “Ideas for Topics:”  This is a lovely thing for her to do as coming up with ideas to write about is, for me, just about the hardest part of writing blog posts.

One of Ari’s handy Ideas for Topics is:

 How you get your creative ideas etc.

I chuckled and thought, “How apropos!”

Getting ideas for anything is part of the challenge of all creative endeavors. But, we often have trouble tacking down where these ideas, or inspirations, come from.

Stephen King in his book On Writing, when talking about the group of friends he’s in a band with, says this:

“We do it for the music . . . We like each other . . . We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.”

And that’s the gist of it.

Inspiration

I used to be a calligrapher and one time I was wracking my brain to come up with a good quote for a piece for a niece’s high school graduation gift. I looked through all the quotes I had collected and none seemed to fit. I needed inspiration.

“Aha! Inspiration! What is inspiration?” I thought. “I know. I’ll use the definition of the word inspiration for the piece!”

1 the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, esp. to do something creative:

Not exactly inspiring.

Then inspiration struck! What would I get if I took the word apart? What are the definitions of “in” and “spire” and “tion?” And that was my answer.

 

I had no idea where the idea to use a definition came from, nor where the idea to take the word apart and define the pieces came from, but I still love where that all took me.

But sometimes we at least know what triggers ideas.

When I first started to think about writing original novels I figured I’d write mysteries as they are my favorite genre. There was a bluegrass/old time song in the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? that I just loved.

Give it a listen. Turn it up enough to listen for the musical saw being played in the background. Feel the strangeness of the setting and the eeriness of the sound.

Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby from O Brother Where Art Thou

Oh yeah!

The ideas for my first two books Music can be Murder, and Death can be Hooked both came from that song. The otherworldly music and two of the lines “You and me and the devil makes three.” and “She’s long gone with her red shoes on.” were all my mind needed, and off it ran.

How do you get your creative ideas?

Have you tried to figure it out?

Do you have a tried and true method or writing ritual that regularly produces useable ideas for you?

Do you use idea generators online?

Or are you more like me, waiting for them to bloom from unexpected sources like songs, words and phrases from a writing challenge, or even a dictionary – or to suddenly appear in a stray thought?

Or maybe Stephen King and his writer friends have it right: “. . . we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.”

About Pearl

Slightly quirky, always creative, Pearl R. Meaker has been an artist and craftsperson her whole life. Although she’s always had stories in her head, they didn’t come out where others could read them until the advent of home computers with their ease of making corrections and moving bits around.

When not playing with her story ideas you can find Pearl reading all sorts of books, knitting or crocheting, doing other arts and crafts, bird watching and photographing nature.

She also plays bluegrass fiddle along with her banjo-picking husband.

The Can Be Mysteries

Life is about learning what we can be.

Emory Crawford, an empty nest wife and homemaker is learning things about herself she didn’t know. With help from her chemist and forensic scientist husband and her many friends, Emory discovers she can be a sleuth; using Miss Marple like friendliness and nosiness along with her own deep intuition to solve murders and mysteries in the college town of Twombly, Illinois.

The Can Be Mysteries begin with Music can be Murder, Death can be Hooked, and Mysteries can be Buried and will be released on Amazon summer of 2018.

Connect with Pearl

Website

Blog

Facebook

Twitter

Goodreads

The Devil’s Music by Pearl R Meaker

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A big thanks to Pearl for joining us again on this blog.  It is always lovely having her here.  Please check out her links and if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below 🙂

Thanks to all the new likes and followers I’ve received.  They are all truly appreciated.

I’ll be back on Friday, see you then.