Deriving Inspiration?

[YoThere82]

Let's say you're a budding author and you want to write erotic fiction. How do you get your inspiration? And how do you combat a lack of one?

 

[AchtungNight]

I view movies, pictures, and texts and think about how the characters involved could be doing something hot. Some of my ideas' results can be found on Lit.

As for combatting a lack of inspiration, I take off a few days and let ideas gel in my head. I'm usually pleased with the results.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

What do you fantasize about when you're, er, on your own?

 

[Oblimo]

Stephen King once said that the story fairy likes to shit on his head.

In other words, inertia is a writer's greatest friend (if ideas are flowing) and worst enemy (if nothing's coming). The classic technique for building the good inertia and breaking down the bad is to brainstorm: write at least 500 words a day about anything. Don't bother to edit or even spell check. Put all that crap in a folder. If you're stuck one day, grab something at random from that folder and develop it. After a many moons of that (and hating every single minute of it), I can come up with ideas pretty quickly. The important thing I've learned to accept is that I won't like most of them and the rest will turn out to be things I subconsciously stole from someone else.

The other classic technique, drugs and alcohol, I really don't recommend, at least in traditional writerly amounts.