Last week, I discussed receiving inspiration from video games, movies and books. This week, I'm going to mention gaining inspiration from music, artwork/images and nature. With regards to music, I personally find that listening instrumental music of some variety really helps with triggering certain emotions while writing. If I'm writing a more emotional scene in a horror novel, I'll listen to an instrumental piece from a horror video game that fits the tone of the chapter. I find that the pace and tone of the music notes help set the scene and speed of the story/chapter. It's almost as if you're painting a picture from the notes and providing an image to capture the meaning of the song. As for songs with lyrics, those can be helpful as well if the beat and lyrics match the scene you're writing. For example if it's a battle scene, I find that metal sometimes fits perfectly since it makes it feel almost as if you're a part of the fight yourself, especially if a lot of action is occurring all at once.
As for artwork/images, it's a good way to gain inspiration for the landscape in your story. If you live in a snowy climate, but you want to write about a desert, you can look up images of a desert and gather what the landscape potentially looks like. The same goes for a fantasy world. It's helpful, for example, to see what kind of creatures might lurk in certain magical forests. In other words, artwork gives a nice starting point when describing the setting in your book, and it's also cheaper than traveling to a desert, forest, etc. to see those kinds of landscapes.
Finally, nature gives you a more interactive approach than the other two. If you want to write a story in a forest and you live in a forest, that gives you an opportunity that you wouldn't have through examining artwork/images. You can walk through the forest, see the wildlife there for yourself and interact with the environment to understand what would be realistic actions and reactions for your characters to make in that landscape. A problem with this form is that if you want to write about snowy mountains and you have to take a plane to explore that landscape, it's going to be probably expensive. And this is the benefit of artwork/images as mentioned above; you don't have to travel. Anyway, I hope that this helps!
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