In the last three years, I’ve re-discovered my love of reading. As a kid, I was a voracious reader.1 Slowly the amount that I read for pleasure dwindled. When I was in high school, I read maybe 3 books a year for fun. By the time I was in college, that dropped down to at most 1.
What drove me back to reading was actually a desire to sleep better. There’s a general consensus that limiting screen time before bed will improve you sleep with the recommendation being no screens 2 hours before you go to sleep. So what better to do in that time than start reading?
Consistently reading is one of the best habits I’ve picked up. It feels like I’m constantly getting to refuel my brain and my creative energy every night. I recently read Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace and I cannot stop gushing over it. I feel like just the act of engaging with an excellent book makes me want to create. Reading is in no small part a reason why I (and I’m sure many others) decided to try writing more consistently.
This made me think about other ways I’ve become “inspired”. What are my sources of creative fuel?2 Here’s an incomplete, unordered list:
- Art museums
- Any excellent piece of media, be it video games, books, movies, or albums
- Videos of people being really good at something
- Walks in our yard
- Conversations with my loved ones
- A mildly inconvenient problem
- The ingenuity of animals
- Resting
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My schools participated in the Accelerated Reader program which let you take a quiz on books to test your comprehension. If you passed, you were awarded points which scaled with the reading difficulty of the book. The desire to be good at something and win perhaps drove my reading more than the love of reading itself. Still, if it wasn’t for that, I may not have desire to read that I have now. ↩︎
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I don’t love the concept of inspiration nor the phrase creative fuel. Inspiration implies a spark that leads to an instant creation. But, in my experience, creativity is a much slower process. Creative fuel implies taking an input and burning or using it up for some output. This feels gross and exploitative. However, it’s still apt as the metaphor I’m thinking of is creativity as a fire that must be stoked and somehow kept alive. ↩︎