Where is the inexhaustible source of inspiration for your writing?

I’m going to be quite bold in my next statement and say that it lies in you. You are your most valuable and inexhaustible well of inspiration for any story, poem, article or blog post you want to write. Sounds strange? Now, before you dismiss the rest of the article, let me elaborate a bit:

Often times, we look for external stimulants, information for guidance and ideas for our writing. But I believe that our own actual, raw and vivid experiences are our truest guides in which direction our writing should go. Every event, relationship, travel, struggle, joy, pain, suffering, reasons to be happy…are our best source of inspiration. When you share sincere bits of your personalities, these are the parts that people can relate to most.

You can write a beautiful poem about your ordinary everyday trip to a grocery store (like an ode to strawberries 🙂 ), you can write how technology impacts your life or how you love or dislike your current job…you can write about your need to write..you can find inspiration in children which can trigger some childhood memory and evoke new poem to be written.

But everything is in you. We can just look for some external motivators like current circumstances, sounds or place we are at the moment (I wrote a few poems while being on the plane 🙂 ) that will inspire our writing .

Jorges Luis Borges once said:

A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

Lessons we learned in our life journey are our greatest teachers and I believe also a huge inspiration for anything further we do in life. And so with writing. I have found that when I share what I learned in my life so far – it’s like opening the door to even greater source of inspiration and it helps me avoid in future some of the mistakes I made in the past.

Or you can write about what you would like to experience – let your wishes and desires simply go wild with your imagination.

As long as you write what you know to be true in life, how you perceive life, beauty, love, pain, suffering..you simply can’t go wrong with that. You are unique and extraordinary human being with universal skills and experiences. Share and write about that, and your writing will be nothing less but exquisite.

I love all beauteous things,
I seek and adore them;
God hath no better praise,
And man in his hasty days
Is honoured for them.

I too will something make
And joy in the making!
Altho’ tomorrow it seem’
Like the empty words of a dream
Remembered, on waking.

Robert Seymour Bridges 

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