Hey everyone! Here we are again with the third post in the inspiration series. Is anyone inspired yet? As I mentioned in the last post I’m open to hearing about any new ideas or fun things that you have planned from anything you learned in the earlier parts of this series. I can’t wait to hear what you think! As it’s nearing the end of June, I hope you are all doing well with any fun summer writing projects that you have planned for yourself. If you haven’t, I hope that this post can also help you come up with some new book ideas. Without further ado….
Inspiration: People Watch
People watching. Its an interesting thing that most writers do on their own out of curiosity and creativity. People watching is an amazing activity for finding inspiration. It can inspire interesting situations, dialogue, characters, worlds, and even whole storylines. I personally am a big fan of people watching whether I do it alone or with someone else. I one time spent a whole meal people watching a restaurant across the street with a friend and coming up with crazy stories and dialogues for the people that we saw.
People watching is both a fun activity and a writing building activity. However, to really be inspired by people watching there is more to it than just watching those around you. I’m hoping in this post that I can list different ways to people watch that will really help to improve your people watching abilities to help inspire more unique story ideas.
Take Notes While People Watching
If you are like me then you could spend hours people watching and never get bored. However, if you are too much like me then you’ll get to the end of a fun people watching session and realize that you don’t remember anything about the cool interesting people and situations that you just saw and all the ideas that you had while people watching are gone. Solving this problem is simple.
Take notes while people watching. I will admit that in certain situations and in certain environments, taking notes while people watching will make you appear a little weird. But just remember, we’re writers, we’ll look weird anyway. Might as well get some productive ideas out of it.
Taking notes is one of the most effective ways that I have found to proactively remember things that I observe or imagine while people watching. These notes can be taken in whatever fashion you would like, or feel is appropriate. I personally have times where I take notes in full paragraphs with short sketches and details and other times it’s a few keywords that I know will help me remember what I saw but make no sense to anyone watching over my shoulder such as “red hair, green coat, dragon armor, at the café”. (This was an actual note I once took and no, I won’t explain it to you. It was one of my best ideas! 😊)
Find New and Unique Places
A large majority of writers are homebodies and if they go out at all they tend to go to the same places that they are familiar with. Because of this, its common to run into the same types of people in the same kinds of situations every time you go out. This is not a bad thing. But when it comes to people watching it is not ideal. People watching is meant to inspire new and unique ideas. But if you are witnessing the same kinds of people and the same world every time you leave your home you aren’t seeing anything that you haven’t already seen which can make you ideas and your stories stagnant.
Solving this problem requires you to go outside of your home and find new places that you have never been to before and observe new people that you have never seen. My favorite people watching places are parks. However, from time to time I challenge myself to go somewhere new like a café, a restaurant, a busy street in town, or even a grocery store. (The poor security guards at grocery stores probably wonder sometimes why a strange woman wanders the isles for a couple hours).
Listen to Dialogue
There are many different ways to people watch, the most typical being physically watching people around you do their everyday things. One of my favorite kinds of people watching however, does not require your eyes at all. My favorite form of people watching is listening to the dialogue going on around me. It is easier to do than watching those around me and I can do it without looking like a weirdo who watches people like if I was watching people walk around. My favorite thing to do is look like I have music in because of earbuds but actually just be listening to people around me.
Dialogue can be very interesting and easy to inspire yourself with because simple dialogue that could make perfect sense in the situations you observe it in could have a completely different tone in a different situation with different people. Dialogue is one of the easiest things to take from real life and transplant into a different story and still have it make sense. You also can hear some of the most interesting things by listening in on other people’s dialogues.
For example, one time I was sitting on the stairs of a building at my campus which were facing a sidewalk that was commonly used but never too full of people that I couldn’t observe specific individuals. I was doing my typical headphones in but not actually listening technique, when I saw a young man and women walk by heading towards the car park, obviously done with class for the day. It sounded like they were planning some sort of event together. Luckily, I had my notebook for people watching and I wrote down what they said. He said, “So maybe you can come early and help me with the food. We can make brownies.” She said, “Yeah. Sure. I can maybe bring my boyfriend over too.” She added a little bit of emphasis on the word boyfriend, and he looked a little surprised and sad when he replied, almost out of my earshot, “Yeah. Sure. Bring your boyfriend.”
If I had not been listening for dialogue, I would not have caught this hilarious dialogue (for us as a third party, not for the poor guy) to inspire me to write a short story titled The Permanent Third Wheel I will never show anyone because I have always claimed to never write romance. Haha.
All in all people watching is a great source of inspiration. When it comes down to it a story is about the people in it. If you don’t have good characters than a story will never go anywhere outside of your first draft. And what better place to create a story than being inspired by the people who lead stories, other humans.
I hope this week’s post was helpful for everyone. People watching is one of my favorite things to do. I can’t wait to be able to back out and do it again. As always don’t forget to like, share, become a blog page member, subscribe or follow me on social media at the links at the bottom of the page. I hope you all have a great week. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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