Inspired to Write: Getting inspiration from everyday life

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by on this, the first day of our series for the month of June! It took me… far longer than it should’ve... to come up with a theme for this month. But come up with one I did, and it’s a really fun one, if you ask me. It better be, or else even I would be bored ;-)

Without further ado, let’s get into it!

Let’s talk about inspiration, this month. It’s one of those things that often takes a long time for writers to find—either that, or it comes to us so easily that we don’t even think of it. Whichever one you are, I thought we’d take some time this month to talk about some of the things writers get inspiration from. Using myself as an example, because, hey, I write a lot.

Inspired to Write: Everyday life

For many writers, myself included, the best form of inspiration is our everyday life. Whether it be a crazy friend or an insane situation that no one in their right mind could believe would actually happen to someone in real life (and yet, did), real life leads to many fascinating stories. For non-genre fiction and nonfiction (of the “creative” nature or not) in particular, this becomes a very easy inspiration for stories. We can literally take what happened and translate it into the pages of our work-in-progress.

Others, of course, need to put in a little more work than that. We science-fiction and fantasy authors have to tweak things in far greater detail in order to make our everyday life stories fit into our worlds. If there was a crazy incident on the highway and we want to translate that into a space race or a daring chase on foot, we’ll have to change things. We can’t even use the same words.

But whatever the case, the real world is a great place to find inspiration for our stories.

Me? I find inspiration in the things around me, all the time. When I was in college, I was inspired by random sentences my teachers said (often in passing), to write long prose pieces that I still adore to this day. I’ve even found the same happen in my Bible study groups, nowadays. Likewise, I find inspiration when I see a mother caring for her child who’s fallen on the sidewalk, when I watch a man stride with confidence into a meeting, when the moon peeks out from behind the Sandia Mountains and shines its orange-yellow light over the city below. Inspiration is always there, just waiting to be seen.

Some might even say that the real world is the very best place to find inspiration for your writing, because the real world is, well, real. The things that inspire you here are the things that will seem the most real to your readers, no matter what genre you write in.

And in many ways, those people would be right.

Next time, let’s talk about a slightly more interesting inspiration, shall we? ;-)

[love]

{Rani Divine}