The Creativity Project: Inspiration

A conversation about books that made me want to read and write.

Photo by carolyn christine on Unsplash

One of my friends and I were talking the other day about ideas for my YouTube channel and he mentioned that I should talk about my top three books that inspired me to write. Well, I can’t pick just three. Let’s be honest: it’s hard to narrow it down to a manageable list.

While I have a top 5 that I’ve narrowed it down to for the sake of brevity, I wanted to talk about some of the other books that didn’t quite make the cut.

1. The Wizard of Oz books. I’ve read most of these and will sometimes go back to the nightmare fuel that is Return to Oz, but the Patchwork Girl of Oz was the book I read to tatters. This series was a deep dive into a different mythology and showed me how to build complex worlds.
2. Twin of Fire and Twin of Ice. These were the first romance novels I read which makes them very formative for my romance loving brain.
3. Emily of New Moon. While Anne of Green Gables will always hold a special place in my heart, I always had a closer relationship to the Emily books. She was a writer struggling to realize her dream of being a published author.
4. The Iron King. I’m a huge lover of fairies and fairy stories. This series re-ignited my love of the genre.
5. The Emotion Thesaurus. If you’re a writer, this is just one of a fairly sizable collection of thesauruses that have helped change the game. It gives me other ideas on how to show what a character is feeling other than blushing or biting their lips (even though I still use the heck out of those).

I think it’s funny that the list of books I did choose to talk about in my video run the gambit from the book that made me want to read to the one that made me believe I could be published to the one that gave me the best breakdown of how my genre is written.

For me, inspiration can strike in the most unlikely places. It can be the right book at the right time or it can be the wrong book at the right time. I take bits of inspiration from everything I read, even if it is just on how I would do it differently.

What book inspired you the most? Let me know in the comments!