#kittysdevil

Title: Love Stinks Pairing: Frank/Gerard, Alicia/Mikey Rating: NC-17 Word Count: 4,174 Warnings: Podfic, Hurt/comfort, Learning to be loved Summary: Love didn't exist, relationships never worked and nothing was going to change Frank's mind. Until Frank gave up, Mikey got engaged and Gerard showed up late to a fitting. Author: kittys_devil, melesmeles

yellow: what do you do when you’re stuck in a block? list three sources of inspiration when new ideas are scarce.

Oh man, okay. So the first two sources of inspiration are pretty much the same, but one is deliberate and other is sort of free-flowing.

If I'm blocked or want to write but don't know WHAT to write, specifically, I'll do a challenge with prompts or just ask my friends what I should write, and 9 times out of 10 something will pop up that grabs me and everything will just spiral from there. The best example of this is On the Midtown Direct, which I never would have written if I hadn't asked rivers_bend for possible big bang ideas. She said, well, I love train stories, and for whatever reason that just CLICKED in my brain and the entire thing took off on its own. There were other ideas/prompts that she and a couple of other friends suggested around that same time, most of which never happened--it's not that I'll respond to EVERY prompt. But when they work, they really work. And when I'm blocked on a specific plot point or whatever in a story I'm in the middle of writing, I talk it out with friends, and usually just the act of emailing someone all HELP I CAN'T FIGURE THIS OUT is enough to point me in the right direction. Writing for me is very collaborative. Pretty much every rough draft I do is audienced, and that sort of feedback early on is key. It keeps me going and lets my brain bounce along without getting held up and obsessing over stuff. 

The second kind of inspiration from friends is the sort of organic discussion on twitter or in LJ comments or an email thread or whatever, where I'm not actively LOOKING for an idea but it just comes and smacks me in the face. Most times these ideas are directly related to something awesome that the characters I'm writing have just done, like a new photoshoot or a concert or just BEING THEM, and the discussions we're all having about them, but sometimes it's totally unrelated. Imitate the Sun, my Merlin AU, happened as a result of a conversation on twitter about Gerard's middle name. My brain suddenly connected Gerard Arthur to KING Arthur, and that was that. So really, interacting with the rest of fandom is how my ideas get going the vast majority of the time.