Creative Inspirational: Using Sound to Inspire Your Words

Good morning writers!

Welcome to the first Unicorn Walrus inspirational. I'll be doing this every morning, writing whatever is on my mind in hopes that by the grace of the whatever it is you believe in that you will finally write. Something, anything...

It's always so hard to find that inspiration, you know? I even have trouble and I've been writing fairly consistently for most of my life. I struggle to stay inspired, it's a full-time job and regardless of what you write, inspiration and motivation are two basics you have to have down to have any success at writing.

If you're uninspired your writing will be bland and if you're unmotivated you won't exist as a writer at all. The latter will be a subject for a future inspirational.  Right now let's discuss the idea of being uninspired, and some ways you could rekindle that long lost flame of yours.

Doing Hard Drugs
Hard drugs and hallucinogens like heroine, meth, and acid are bad for you. Don't do them. (You didn't really think I'd recommend that, did you? Haha.)

Who invited this guy?

Okay, okay. In all seriousness there are quite a few artists (yes, as a writer you are indeed an artist) who turn to drugs to reach their subconscious. I do not promote this idea myself, but look at Hunter S. Thompson...to each their own I guess, but I've got my own methods. And no it isn't black tar heroine.

I use music...it's kind of like a drug in its own right (I'm a huge music enthusiast). Like colors as I explained in the previous post, music also evokes emotions, thoughts, feelings, memories, moods, and inspiration. Some could argue that the added "noise" hurts their writing more than helps it, but for me it's quite the opposite. Every morning when wake up and see my wife off to work I have my pot of coffee while my Pandora stirs the nests of the tenants around my apartment, and I write.

The music forces my mind to be creative. It evokes emotions of whichever I choose, because I have control of what I listen to. When I'm writing fiction with a dark, sadistic twist I'll put on a Tool playlist (if Maynard doesn't inspire you, you've got some bigger issues buddy.) If I'm writing a heartbreaking scene in a story I'll put on the most atrocious love song of all time, something that just brings back the most horrid, soul-shearing memories of my life; those are the emotions I strive to write by as a writer. Feelings I have felt, and ones I can apply with absolute confidence to my work. Music will always have this effect, after all - almost all songs are derived from writings of some sort. If words inspire music, shouldn't music inspire words? Even instrumental pieces with no lyrics still tend to draw these feelings out of us.

Take something as simple as whales songs as an example. You know those audio recordings of whales? Yeah those. Give it a listen and be conscious of your emotional state. I can almost promise you'll gain an overwhelming feeling of something, maybe mysteriousness from these leviathan and their strange language? Perhaps it will inspire the beauty and majestic grace of your words, that they will flow unto the page, much like the everlasting delta melds so perfectly, so precisely into the great expanse of the sea.

Understand then, that music can and should play a large part in your never ending quest for personal inspiration. Even if you aren't a writer you should try to inspire yourself for life in general. Inspiration leads to new people, new experiences, and an abundance of different walks of life. But as a writer, I'd strongly recommend applying this personal practice of listening to music as a source of inspiration for your writing. It has helped me time and time again, and is usually a quick-fix for almost all cases of writer's block I've ever encountered.

Happy writing :)
M. Hascall

Writing Exercise: Using Color to Inspire Creative Writing

It's pretty common knowledge that colors have psychology behind them.

"Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions." - Pablo Picasso

Artists and visual designers of all kinds fully understand the effects of color on the mind, and how they bring out emotion in people. Not only to the people viewing the art, but to the artists themselves as they paint. As a writer, you are an artist. Your words create pictures, circumstances, emotion, and vivid imagery (or at least they should). No matter what you are writing, you are always writing for the most very basic of emotions. But printed copy is almost always in black, so how can you, as a writer, use color to your advantage besides using it as a descriptor?

This is where I'd like to explore the concept of writing in color - literally. Getting a box of colored pencils, and writing your work in color BEFORE you print it out. If you prefer to write on computer rather than by hand, just change the color of your text as you write, and once you're finished change it all back to black so it meets the industry standards.

Kinda confused? Let's go through an example of how color can be applied to your writing to inspire a more creative side of your work. 

Let's say we're writing an influential piece on some political stance - saving baby seals from gruesome clubbing genocides perhaps? Sounds good. You're kind of on the fence about the entire concept of clubbing a baby seal and how wrong it is, i.e., you don't really care...(not that anyone could NOT care about that issue, it's a baby seal, FIGHT THE MACHINE). However you still have to write about it because that's what your client wants. Baby freaking seals. So you aren't sure how to get passionate about the poor little things...try writing in color. We want to get our readers to fall in love with baby seals, so we first have to fall in love with baby seals ourselves. 

We will choose pink as our color of choice for this.

 Pink (not red) is the prime color of choice to evoke psychological emotions of love, kind and gentle feelings, and overall passion and genuine appreciation. You might see on a television show that a criminal is housed in a pink cell. There's a reason for that! It's to soothe them, to calm them down. Again colors have a real effect on people. So we open up our word processor, change to a dark background and our text color to pink so we can still read what we're typing, and write our faces off. Staring at pink text as we write instills us with above said emotions, but just for that brief period when we are writing. Our words won't be pink when they're published, but rather during drafting, so we can infuse them with those feelings we're evoking by using color. Now your article about baby seals is no longer monotone and bland because you wrote it in black and white, now it's full of passion, love, and adoration through the purest emotion your heart could muster - all because you wrote it in pink.

Clearly it probably won't be that dramatic, but it is an interesting concept to think about. Seems like a fun writing exercise to me, so give it a try and comment back with any effects writing in color had on you.

• Figure out what basic emotions you are trying to portray through your piece of work.
• Find out which color represents what emotion.
• Pick your color(s) accordingly. 
• Write!
• Doing a love scene? Write it in pink. Introducing a character who is the warm, happy and full of energy? Try orange!

Color psychology is real, and I'm curious to see how this fun exercise could affect my own writing, and yours! :)