Inspiration comes in so many forms. What helps me is to slow down. That’s what I think of when I think of inspiration: a slow, churning thing that cannot be rushed, not until all the ideas come to you and suddenly it’s as though you can’t write them down fast enough. I’ve wanted to write about inspiration for a long time, but didn’t quite know how to approach it. A lot of the time, I’m not aware of what inspires me to write. The story I’m working on now came from inspiration at a baby shower, but it has nothing to do with babies. The short story I’m maybe finished with, but not really, was inspired from an up and coming digital literary journal that wanted queries of stories no more than 2,000 words. My story is more than 2,000 words, and it is about something of which almost literally came from nothing. I just started writing and all of a sudden these characters were saying these things, and I didn’t know where it was coming from in my head. It was like my body had more knowledge of where things should be going than my mind did. It is the most detached I’ve ever felt from a story, yet it is almost everything I’ve ever felt about life.
Inspiration is something to be poked and prodded, but it also sneaks up on you at the most unassuming moments. It comes from the mind of a friend, snowballs of thought that roll and roll until they’re so big they could fit a whole story inside. It is in first birthday party invitations from high school friends and a stomach-achingly funny story from a co-worker. It is in the people you pass on the street and the regrets of your past. It is in that necklace you wear around your neck everyday and the college ring you sometimes wear on your left ring finger when you’re buying prenatal vitamins because you’ve heard they’re better than multis. I read the first lines in books, record snippets of conversation in journals, read highlighted texts from random pages in favorite novels. I stare at my bookshelf, recount dreams, browse libraries, sit in coffee shops, listen to music to get myself in the mood to write. I devour the wisdom of Madeleine L’Engle, pray for guidance, reveal secrets to trade in for new ones. Mostly, I just wait. I do a lot of waiting. I wait for ideas to hit me like cold water. Or sometimes they leave traces of themselves like torn pieces of paper in a wooded trail until I find enough pieces to start forming the bigger picture.
Inspiration, I’ve learned, is in what you believe. It is in the things you’ve seen and heard and disagreed with. It is in the things you try to reconcile. It is in how hard you try and how big you dream and how vulnerable you make yourself when you’re already feeling weak. It is in the daring and the adventurous, the contemplative and the reflective. It is in how much you hope for a better tomorrow and how resilient you are against the late nights and haggard days. Inspiration is what you discover: the people you meet, the voices you hear, the lives you love and detest and manipulate. It is something to be coddled and cuddled and clubbed. All it takes is slowing down, opening your eyes, unplugging your ears. Inspiration, then, is always what you make of it.