Friday, October 18, 2019

A Little Experiment

I'm a member of BSFW, one of the best damned spec-fic writers groups anywhere. I've been providing some content for their Twitter feed, and maybe, just maybe, it might be useful to you blog readers. Let's read, shall we?

Today, a writing tip about finding material to inspire you: Don't get locked into the familiar.

1. For instance, if you live in North America or the British Commonwealth, see what's happening elsewhere. Not just events and histories, but what people are writing.












2. Reexamine things you thought were "dead ends." If you look closer, they might inspire you. For decades, historians wrote off the Byzantine Empire because they thought its influence simply stopped at the Ottoman takeover. Now, they're reevaluating it, and it's a fascinating source of material for writers.

Hell, even the Burgess Shale might give you something... https://smithsonianmag.com/history/burgess-shales-weird-wonders-36404411/…




3. In archaeology, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Not every civilization builds in stone and iron. Look past the civilizations you can see to the ones you can't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_Builders…




4. Be aware of the gaps in our knowledge. We've been Homo Sapiens for more than 200,000 years; but our written history begins only 5,000 years ago. What happened before?  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History


If you're feeling uninspired, look where you didn't look before.

No comments:

Post a Comment