inspiration

I've gone and done it again ...

Another idea.

It was actually an old idea, but I finally figured out what to do with it.  

When you write, inspiration can come from all sorts of places. I think everyone probably has his or her own starting places when writing. Some make sense to me. Some others make absolutely no sense to me, but more power to them. 

Does that mean the people who get their inspiration in a similar way to me are "right", and the people who get their inspiration in ways I can't fathom are "wrong"? Absolutely not. It does mean, however, that what I'm about to talk about may not be helpful for everyone. Heck, it may not be helpful to anyone at all, except maybe me. If I worried about that, though, I'd never write anything --so, moving on ...

I've been told my writing style is more literary than commercial. I'm not exactly sure what this means, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that I also write poetry, and that way of thinking permeates everything I do with words. I'm a so-so poet, but I would say that there's a fascination with language and sound and metaphor that gets into everything I write. The first bit on inspiration is for the literary types ...

Sources of inspiration I have used include the following: bits of conversation, works of visual art and sculpture, animals, verb tense, logical arguments that make no sense to me/world events, situations I've seen at work, life experiences outside of work/relationships, psychology, other people's life experiences (biographies), and --my personal favorite --older works by other writers I read. 

I really love that last one. My latest project I am working on/distracted by is based on an old short story. I love nothing more than taking someone else's work and either 1) looking at it from another point of view/points of view or 2) coming up with alternate versions. 

I've never used music as inspiration, but I've heard of people doing that. Other possibilities I haven't used include items of food, geography, items of clothing or other historical articles, and events in history. There may be more. What have I forgotten?

For commercial work, there is one motivation: sell it. There is nothing wrong with this. I have no issues with commercial writing --I'm just not very good at it, I guess. 

There is a difficulty with sales as your inspiration for writing, I would think. It's hard to predict what people might buy. You can look at trends, but it's very important to stay ahead of them so as not to have your voice drowned out in the flood of the latest big thing. If you sell something outright, like an article, that would make more sense to me, if sales are truly your inspiration. 

If I am to be honest, I do use what people are asking for as inspiration, too. My latest project? I saw someone was looking for plays with 1-2 characters in them. That solved my problem of the format for my content. Would I have ever thought to write a play? No. Could I write it as dialogue-heavy prose instead? Sure. But why not give a play a try? Having an idea of what someone else was asking for definitely helped me narrow my focus and figure out exactly what I wanted to talk about, so it was helpful (in this case) to think commercially.

What do you use as inspiration? What works for you?