Where do you get inspiration from?
Following on from the triumphant success of The Writers Workshop’s Writers Day - Write More in ‘24 - we’re sharing prompts to keep you writing, and to get you thinking and sharing your process. Our focus for April is all about trying new things and also about where we get inspiration from as writers, so I thought I’d share my own thoughts around this. Firstly, I’m going to make a confession - it’s not from other writers!
Today’s prompt on Instagram has a bold question in our trademark Writers Day teal: Which writers inspire you? I go to answer it, feeling that I should lead by example and I draw a blank. I’m not sure I’ve really been inspired by a writer since I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own back in 1989! I dredge my mind. No, that’s not true. I was inspired by Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones in 1994 and Julia Cameron’s The Artists’ Way around the same time. As I reflect on the question, I realise that I’ve mostly been inspired by writers who write about writing, who open the doors to other writers (particularly women) and encourage them to believe that they too can write. But novelists, poets, memoirists? Not so much.
It irks me sometimes, this obsession with writers as readers. We’re told constantly that, in order to write, we need to study writing. It’s common sense in some ways that reading will enrich our vocabularies, give us examples of what’s possible and provide an intuitive blueprint for three-act structure, but I hate the way it’s held up as gospel. “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that,” says Stephen King. I’m not sure it’s as simple as that at all and I’ve never wanted to tell a writer to sling his hook so much as I do when I read this. Who am I to argue with Stephen King you might say? He’s much more credible as a writing guru than I am, but still, this statement reeks of male privilege to me. Would he have achieved so much without a partner supporting him and his family? I sorely doubt it.
Is someone without access to books unable to write? Is the voice of the homeless person who left education at fifteen not valid? Is a single mother like myself, who has children to support and a business to run, not allowed to express something without first consulting the literary canon? I just don’t accept it. Like many people who have experienced huge trauma and grief, my ability to read has been badly damaged. I find it hard to watch things too. Watching All of Us Strangers left me reeling with ptsd for over a week. Consuming other people’s media is hard for me these days, but I still believe I’m entitled to put pen to paper. I did, of course, read voraciously as a child and I have an English degree and an MA and a store of words to call on. I am privileged too. But if I don’t have much time and I have to choose, I’m sure as hell going to spend my time writing and not reading.
So, now I’ve got that off my chest, where do I get my inspiration from?
From my own life experience. Just as I have a literary heritage to draw on, I’ve also lived one heck of a dramatic life. Most of my writing comes from my own experience, both in fiction and in life writing. I start often from a scene or an experience and add a what if? My current manuscript had its seed in a conversation with an old flame. The book takes it further. What if the couple had met again? Then what? My YA novel is the same. I was teaching young homeless people and those affected by addiction. What if a middle class girl fell in love with someone whilst tutoring? Anyone can write about their own experience. You don’t have to read about it first.
From workshop prompts. I’ve run workshops for twenty years, and creating writing prompts is my job. A song title, an object, a random assortment of words and I’m off. Stories and poems fly out of my fingers at the slightest provocation these days. It’s pure magic. You should try it!
From other people. A conversation with a friend or another writer. A news article in a magazine. People I see in the world around me. At my dance class, I wonder about the stories of the other couples. What brought them here? Who is having an affair? There are stories everywhere.
From nature. Sometimes I write simply about a flower, a tree, the way the river rushes over the stones. I can write my own poem about a daffodil. I don’t need to pay homage to Wordsworth when I do.
Reading is mostly of benefit to the reader. Better, I’m sure, to have a society largely made up of readers than non-readers as reading engenders thoughtful, empathetic people (we hope). But I believe that writing has more value overall. By writing, I am sharing my story and impacting on other people. Perhaps I’m even inspiring others, opening doors for new writers to follow in my wake. The act of writing, more than the act of reading, inspires me. What about you?