NaNo “Pinspiration”

Hooray! It’s day two! I hope you’re going strong. Throughout the rest of the month, we’ll look at a few tools, tips and techniques to keep us going strong, including things we can do in about 20 minutes to help remind us why we started this story, and fall in love with it all over again.

One recommendation I’ve seen several places is to make yourself a collage of images that speak to you about this book. Several people say that you can look at these collages for inspiration when you find your writing lagging. I love seeing these collage posts on friends’ blogs, but today I’m talking about a different way to do this.

Have you heard of Pinterest? It’s a website where you can virtually “pin” (save) any image or video that inspires you. It also shares these pins with your friends and displays them all organized into separate “boards.” It’s pretty fun. I use it a lot for my craft blog, but every once in a while, I use it for writing.

Now, my friends’ collages are a little more abstract, it seems, but this is my interpretation: some images of character inspirations and major plot elements (okay, and at least one character quirk) in my Nano 2011 WIP:

(I edited out the pictures from the previous couple projects, but the pins are still in there if you follow the link.)

You no longer need an invite to sign up! You can also use your Twitter account or Facebook account to register at Pinterest.

Again, this year, I’m trying out Scrivener for Nano. I really love that you can save your research and even character and inspiration photos right in your project file. It’s also a plus for me that this is private, where Pinterest doesn’t offer private pinboards. However, I also like Pinterest’s one-click capability to add any picture to my boards. So we’ll see what I end up using long term.

How do you make collages for your WIPs? Or do you?

2 thoughts on “NaNo “Pinspiration””

  1. I worry about Pinterest with all the copyright crap that’s been going down lately with photos. Scrivener, however, I am well on board with – I LOVE IT. I use it for everything, even my song tabs and so on.

    Day 2 verdict = i’m at 8k! So pretty happy with that.

  2. You’re back!!

    I love this idea. I used Pinterest for an inspiration board for one story but then just kind of forgot about it in that context. I’ll have to try again.

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