There is nothing like sinking into a good book, letting the story wrap around me for hours, only to emerge at the end, blinking and dazed, and with hands full of inspiration and ideas to take back to my writing desk. When I’m feeling particularly dry creatively, I love to pick up a book or three and lose myself in other people’s fictional worlds for a while. But, apart from books, somewhere I often find plenty of inspiration for my writing is from movies. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve been to the cinema, or started a new film on Netflix, and been overwhelmed with a bunch of new ideas. After all, a good story is a good story, whether you read it on the page, or whether you watch it on as screen.
It was Mad Max: Fury Road that got me interested in writing a dusty dystopian/ apocalyptic style book one day (and that gave me to push to actually draft out a dystopian story of my own, one that I would LOVE to go back to and edit one day). Watching the two new Star Wars movies (the new trilogy, not the A Star Wars Story movies) gave me a whole pile of sci-fi story pieces that are waiting to be assembled into a book sometime in the future. Watching the Maximum Ride movie gave me a ton of inspiration for a series I’m planning/writing about a group of teens with mutant powers (plus of course the X-Men movies have had a huge influence as well).
It’s not even just movies that I’ve enjoyed that give me useful inspiration though. I remember coming away from watching Snow White and the Huntsman for the first time, thinking the movie was a bit of a disappointment, but at the same time clutching onto a huge, important idea that later fixed a massive problem I’d been struggling with in my book The Crystal Tree. I wish I could remember what that specific piece of inspiration was, but I do remember the excitement of being hit with a sudden bolt of inspiration that turned out to be invaluable to my current writing situation.
Maybe part of the reason why I find movies so good for finding inspiration is because they’re so visual. Something about being able to see the details on screen catches at my imagination. Maybe it’s not the main action that inspires something, but something happening in the background, or someone’s expression, or even an object, something that has had no attention drawn to it at all, but that catches my fancy anyway. Or the vivid setting, like Fury Road’s desert dystopia, often sparks something in my mind.
Maybe part of it is that I’m seeing stories told in a different way. It’s the difference between reading Maximum Ride and watching the movie. The movie may or may not be better than the book, but it’s presented to me in a different way, and that seems to break some sort of barrier in my mind. I can see other possibilities for storytelling and other ideas outside of the narrow box that my brain can sometimes limit itself into.
Maybe part of it is also that watching movies, while captivating, isn’t such hard work as reading. Yes, I have to pay some amount of attention so that I know what’s going on in the story, but at the same time, my imagination isn’t tied up in trying to recreate what I’m reading on the page. It’s got more free time to start wandering and imagining things connected to the story, building out little pieces of inspiration while it’s not having to work particularly hard.
Books are one of my favourite ways to be inspired, but movies are certainly another powerful weapon in my inspiration arsenal. And sometimes, when I’m feeling creatively dry, or I’m looking for some extra inspiration to push me through a difficult patch and my brain is too exhausted to manage books, I like to turn to movies, both so that I can relax for a while, and also as a way to gather more ideas to take back to my writing and weave into stories of my own.
What movies have inspired ideas for your writing? What is your favourite or best method for inspiring yourself if you’re feeling a bit creatively dry? What is the best movie you’ve seen recently?
