Where do you get your inspiration?

This is probably one of the most common questions posed to any author, and it’s one of the hardest to answer. At least for me. While it’s true that I take plenty of my own experiences and twist them into something more compelling, a lot of the time, I just think of stuff. Ideas spring from my imagination. And what’s my imagination tapping into?

I have no idea.

I taught writing to international college students for several years, and they were constantly asking me how they could make their papers more interesting. I did exercises with them on how to write attention-grabbing first sentences, how to play around with metaphor, how to spice up their sentences with new vocabulary. Some students worked hard and incorporated these suggestions into their own writing. Others continued to struggle with stringing together coherent ideas, but that was largely a function of the fact that they weren’t writing in their native language. I was a Russian major in college, so I know what a challenge it is to try to be creative with linguistic limitations.

Where am I going with this? I guess my point is that there are a lot of variables at play when it comes to inspiration. What are you writing about? How close is the subject matter to your own experiences? And most importantly, have you done any creative writing before? Many of my students had not. They were from countries where rote memorization and exam scores were the key to academic success. Plagiarism was a huge problem; the whole notion of creative ownership was completely foreign to a lot of them. They’d been taught that the ideas of others were much more valuable than their own, so writing was an exercise in collecting those ideas, not thinking up new ones.

Now, I know that there are very few original ideas out there. I take comfort in the fact that the things I think and feel are part of the human experience, and that somewhere out there, at some point in time, another person was thinking and feeling the same things as me. But when I figure things out for myself, I am more likely to learn and grow. If someone shares an idea or gives me advice, I may hear it but fail to truly internalize it.

So while I like to think I’m a naturally imaginative person, I have also been writing fiction in some form or another for nearly thirty years (OMG–I can’t believe I’m old enough to write that!). I’ve had a lot of practice. And that’s really what it all boils down to. Writing is very much like athletic training. You have to do it consistently and continue to challenge yourself to see improvement. And even if your ideas aren’t original to the world, what matters is that they’re original to you.