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We were entertainingly horrified when we realised we’d got almost all the way to the end of season 5 before devoting an episode to inspiration – what kind of creative podcast even is this?!

So that’s what we’re talking about today – inspiration, where it comes from, what it is, how to find it, and all those things.

In fairness, it has been on the list since the start, it’s just such a BIG topic… but also crucial to creativity, so here goes! We very quickly decided not to try and define it – inspiration is whatever you define it to be.

Where does inspiration come from?

Where does inspiration come from? Everywhere. Anywhere. Sometimes surprising places. And sometimes you don’t know and can’t track down where it came from, even after you’ve finished the thing it inspired.

3am rabbitholes about how to add gold leaf to a non existent mirror, writers drawing threads of inspiration for characters from people they know in real life, percolation of things your brain notices and finds interesting, conversations, news articles – inspiration sneaks in from all kinds of unexpected places and can sometimes take a while to pop back up and be useful.

Collecting inspiration

Inspiration is definitely a permission slip to be a magpie – collecting and filing away anything which sparks your interest, preserving things which might lead to other things.

Sometimes hunting for physical things to add to a collection can spark mental inspiration that isn’t directly connected to that collection – which is kind of magical!

Cataloguing – Carla can’t shake her librarian soul, and still catalogues her inspiration and makes lists and numbered collections so she can find each thing again, and a lot of hers tends to be physical. Sarah has a series of places to catch her inspiration, much of which is digital, but no catalogue system. Yet.

When inspiration strikes

While recording this we discovered yet another thing where we’re almost spookily opposite in how we do something.

In this case, Carla doesn’t go looking for inspiration, because she is constantly filing stuff away in her mind, and it’s more about when something from that collection comes to the surface and starts fizzing that she can use it. As long as she’s cast her eyes past it at some point, it’s filed away in her weird little photographic brain and will probably pop up later at a really inconvenient moment.

For Sarah, she is always looking for ideas, thoughts, possible inspiration, and will actively go looking for rabbit holes on the internet to throw herself down.

The inspiration process can depend on what perspective you have – is it for your own work, is it for client work, is it for a creative project like house decoration? Each one will probably be approached differently.

Inspiration vs research

Turns out when we pose the question “is an inspiration dive different from a client research dive”, we both have splinters in our bums from sitting on the fence!

Research can be more methodical, inspiration can be more fluid and can go off on tangents more easily, but when you’re doing research you might find tangents and inspiration on the way. And if you’ve been inspired, that might trigger you to research to go deeper – so they are rather inextricably linked, in our book.

Sarah does point out the difference is probably in timing -research for a client has a time limit on the rabbit warrens she can fall down!

When do you get inspiration?

People often talk about having inspiration at the most unlikely moments, when they’re washing their hair or something, and we both resonated with that. Driving, in the shower, just before you fall asleep – basically any time you can’t write down your inspiration, it’ll probably sneak in!

We think it might be because when you’re doing fairly mundane or routine tasks, your brain is engaged elsewhere but doesn’t have to expend creative energy on that task – so it’s free to go “ping” on other things.

If you’re someone who gets inspired before you fall asleep, keeping a notebook by the bed is great – but try and write in it so you can actually read what you’ve written in the morning.

Wild horses and stamping rhino

When a little nudge of inspiration keeps nudging and won’t leave you alone, that’s definitely the time to pay attention to it.

Again, we are so different in how this happens for us – Elizabeth Gilbert talks about horses racing across a field. Carla feels it’s more like rhino stamping on her head, and Sarah’s is more gentle and subtle, like background noise she has to tune into.

[short pause while we have an emotional chat on WhatsApp about ADHD brains and emotional intensity and processing all the bloody data all the time]

Internal vs external inspiration

Another difference we found (and we promise we’re not just the two halves of humanity posing as two human women, honest!), is that for Sarah, inspiration is often external – from seeing stories, articles, things. She can go some time without having an idea and find that stressful.

She will go searching for inspiration when she needs to fill her well, and looks externally for things to inspire her.

Carla’s seems more internal, but she thinks it’s actually more that she subconsciously processes external inspiration and then it bubbles up a bit later on, so isn’t necessarily immediately connected. And her memory is mad – can’t remember what she had for breakfast but has a perfect photographic recall of a textbook she read when she was nine. And knows she has had certain experiences but can’t remember any of the detail of them – not because she doesn’t value them, but the recall just isn’t there.

We got sliiiiightly sidetracked about whether this is a neurodiversity thing, and then brought the conversation back to inspiration – but we quite like that we demonstrated a random bit of inspiration and how that can go without planning to!

Inspiration and sketchbooks

Storing your information is obviously a very personal thing, and will depend on your own preferences – do you write or doodle, record or snip, longform or bullet points?

But we wanted to highlight the Making Connections course by the excellent Juliet Lockhart, because Carla filmed it and Sarah has done it, and it opened up a world of recording inspiration and experiences in sketchbooks that neither of us had fully appreciated before.

And we both now have actual sketchbooks (or scrapbooks, whatever you prefer to call them) and freedom to actually use them that we’d not previously felt.

And then while we were talking about this we had a little ramble about Pinterest, home decor, childhood scrapbooking and some other things – you’ll have to listen in for the full effect!

Inspiration vs imitation

Something that often rears its head when talking about inspiration is imitation, copying or plagiarism. Where is the line?

We have worried in the past because of the subconscious processing our brains do – we know we’d never consciously copy, but it’s a bit stressful when your brain throws things at you without any inkling of the source!

Our conclusion is that nothing is truly original, no idea is unique – we’re all inspired by what we see around us on a daily basis, but ultimately what makes our work unique is that we’re all different people.

And really, it comes down to each individual trying not to copy, because where is the joy and satisfaction in just reproducing something that already exists?

And the reason we threw this big thing into the last few minutes of the podcast was to say don’t be so scared of accidentally copying that you don’t ever look for inspiration.

Ok, we would love to hear from you – are we in fact representative of the two halves of the world, or are we talking bollocks and you have a totally different view to share with us? Tell us everything!!

Links we loved

Making Connections course

Elizabeth Gilbert – we love Big Magic, and we’d recommend catching her on tour if you can