💬 Weekly Question: How do you find and foster creative inspiration?

Back in 2024, I shared an article called “How to Find That Sweet, Sweet Creative Inspiration” in which 25 filmmakers, authors, and comic book writers and artists from around the globe weighed in on a single question. Now, I want to pose the same question to the artists who have subscribed to 5AM StoryTalk:

Creative inspiration can be elusive for some. Can you discuss how you find it, from where you go to leave yourself open to it, to the tools you’ve developed to be ready for and foster it?

This is a subject I’ve written about many times here at 5AM StoryTalk, though perhaps never as explicitly as, “Pay attention, I’m going to tell you how I work.” For example, shortly before the 2024 election, I wrote “A Eulogy for Everything We Never Were (and Never Will Be Again)” about my decision to permanently leave the United States. In it, I detail how this life-changing move was set in motion by a visit to “the Secret Annex” – the Anne Frank House. I was so shaken by the experience that I decided to write a screenplay about Otto Frank’s decision to publish his daughter’s diaries. In fact, within minutes of walking out of the Anne Frank House, I had a working idea of the film’s entire structure. However, what I left out in “Eulogy” was why I think inspiration struck in the first place.

The artist’s life is about far more than the actual act of creation. As I described a moment ago, 90% of my writing is rewriting, but that’s not entirely fair to how I really work because nearly 99% of my actual job is leaving myself open to inspiration.

Some might call this thinking — and that’s true, I suppose. I think a lot. You could even call it a form of conscious curiosity (curiosity, like thinking, requires practice). But I’d say what I’m trying to describe here is an even deeper act on par with a kind of waking meditation. When I’m in this imaginative fog, I drift through it until I collide with ideas I couldn’t see coming until – bam! – I walk face first into them.

This is what happened to me at the Anne Frank House. I entered the building with the intention of emotionally trapping myself in it, a very conscious choice. What I mean is, I didn’t feel the need to visit it to tick it off a list of must-see things to do when in Amsterdam. I needed to visit it to try to understand the terror her family experienced. I needed to at least glimpse it, as much as that was possible. I lingered in claustrophobic rooms until others left, so I could be left alone where Anne played and cried and read and slept for as long as possible. I closed my eyes, to imagine how trapped she must’ve felt. And, as thoughts of my own son slipped into my mind, I found myself in Otto Frank’s shoes, watching his daughter write, unable to communicate with her despite the years they’d spent here together.

Later in the tour, Otto revealed in a video interview he only really got to know his daughter after she died, through her diaries. That was it for me. That was more than I could bear. My son was only two at the time, but I couldn’t imagine going through life feeling so emotionally estranged from him or regretting never really knowing him if something were to happen to him. I started working on the screenplay that would become The Secret Annex before I’d even returned home to Los Angeles.

More recently, I’ve found myself struggling to create the mental space for inspiration to arrive, which I chatted about in this podcast episode. Hustle culture broke me for a while there, handicapping my ability to originate ideas with the frequency and fun I used to. Thankfully, that’s begun to rectify itself through major lifestyle changes. Oh dear, I think I’ve gone on a bit of a ramble, haven’t I?

Now, it’s your turn. Tell me how you foster creativity in your life. And don’t forget to read and weigh in on other’s responses. 5AM StoryTalk is a community, so that means supporting each other.