Every student knows the feeling. A blank piece of paper or word document staring back at you as the deadline ticks closer and closer. In those moments, scrolling on your phone or laptop probably feels like the most alluring option. You might flick open Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube… but what about Pinterest?
Did you know that you can use Pinterest to find inspiration for your creative writing? It’s more than just bedroom aesthetics and recipes. It’s a platform for digital brainstorming which you can add to and bring with you anywhere!
Ideation and Finding Inspiration
The first step in any creative writing assignment is to come up with your idea, usually based on a stimulus or question. You might find this the most daunting part of the process - wondering how to come up with a whole story from scratch.
You might like to base the characters and settings of your piece on your own life, but perhaps you think the story might be a bit boring. Perhaps your task specifies writing a dystopia or mystery, and you’re not sure where to start. Maybe you’ve even received feedback from your teachers in the past saying that your characters seem unrealistic, or that your story lacks detail.
Well, it is this world-building - collecting inspiration for detailed characters and locations - that can lend your writing more depth and authenticity by allowing you to base your stories on existing people, places and events. You can find inspiration everywhere, from artworks to recipes, news stories to poetry.
How to Use Pinterest to Find Inspiration
Now, what if we told you that you could use Pinterest to collect this inspiration and flesh out your stories? Using the search function, you can look for just about anything. From lists of unique names, to character portraits and landscape photography.
For instance, if you want to craft a female protagonist but aren’t sure what to write beyond a “brown-haired girl with hazel eyes”, you could simply search for ‘female character inspiration’. Then, describing what you see, you could craft a “girl with cropped chestnut bangs and eyes like dark amber, her dull-grey Victorian coat sagging from her shoulders”. As you can see, in this example, we’ve taken details from the two images below to create the character.
A similar feat can be achieved with settings, searching for something as simple as ‘cornfield at night’ and describing the “dried stalks of corn reaching for the ink-black sky like withering hands, as the amber moonlight unveils a worn path”.
The best part about Pinterest is that it will suggest you several posts or ‘pins’ based on your search, and then even more based on those you click, meaning practically endless and evolving inspiration!
How to Use Boards
Pinterest is designed to make it easy for you to collect ideas and organise them into different folders called ‘boards’; a feature you can use to your advantage.
One approach is to create a board for the story you are writing and add pins of different character portraits, real or fantasy locations and even written posts that could inspire your plot. The benefit of this is that you can keep your idea focused and build depth quite easily, keeping your inspiration all in one place.
As you become more familiar with the practice, you could even create boards for future stories, saving pins that you may use as a stimulus later. You can organise this by category (character, location, plot) or even by different ideas or worlds.
Either way, this helpful practice can turn your procrastination into inspiration, building interesting stories from the comfort of your bed, or even on the bus back from school.
Who said coming up with ideas couldn’t be fun and easy?
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