Do you read as well?

Sometimes, reading others' stories can be a great source of inspiration ranging from a whole story line that you think you can write better down to a quote or a specific character quirk that you could have fun with yourself.

Inspiration has to be taken from wherever you can find it - which is why I can often be found highlighting blocks of text on my Kindle. To the average reader or even the author, the seemingly random highlights I make often don't follow a pattern or may not make any real sense but to me, those little nuggets are priceless. I don't always incorporate things right away either - they can sometimes sit in my Evernote until the perfect chance to use them to the best of my abilities arises... but when that chance presents itself, I've often found the results to be quite good and well worth the time I took to jot down the few notes that I took from the source book.

Don't be afraid to mix your fiction with some fact, either. If you are going to write a post-apocalyptic book... take the time to think about how people generally tend to react to things like freak weather - if enough warning is given, that will be how we are going to respond to news of the end of the world... so you can expect lots of panic buying rather than plenty of stuff being left behind for looters later on. Keeping that in mind and knowing that the bulk of our stuff in shops often comes in on the back of trucks, it's far more likely that people would be much more interested in stealing from trucks, warehouses and storage units as opposed to breaking into shops that could have already been wiped clean of whatever stock they may once have contained.

Of course, reading the works of others isn't always about gleaning inspiration from wherever you can, it can also be a good source of market research as well since it goes without saying that there will be aspects of books that will make you wonder "What on earth was this author thinking?". On some occasions you'll find that you are better able to take this idea and move it forward yourself - which is fine, as long as you are able to make it your own (no one likes a ripper) and other times you might find that even you don't have the know-how to bring this idea forward... which is fine, too.

The point in reading others' works is to get a better idea of what works and what doesn't work so that in time you can have a library of knowledge in your head and be better able to know if what you are thinking is something that you can make a book out of or if it's going to be the biggest pile of drivel that you've ever had the misfortune of clapping your eyes on.