Inspiration Prevents Writers Block

 

            I suppose I’m a little perverse; I have the opposite problem most writers suffer.  I don’t get writers block.  Instead, I don’t have enough time or keyboard speed to write up all the ideas I have.  A good problem to have, I admit, in many ways.

 

            What prevents writers block for me?  I’m always open to inspiration. The whole world becomes my notebook.  For instance, my morning commute is about 25 minutes.

I use that time to think about writing projects, and to observe as I drive.  Last winter, while I waited to get on the bridge, I was treated to a sight I’d never seen.  On a cold, bitter January day, 4 coyotes crossed in front of my car.  They walked to the riverbank and crossed the frozen river, disappearing into the little island that dot the Mississippi in our stretch of the Midwest.

 

            I got a pretty good blog post for my blog on Green Living out of that one.

 

            I also like to listen to the radio.  I love all types of music, but I also like talk radio, NPR, old radio dramas, you name it.  For awhile, I had Sirius and luxuriated in the sounds of Marta Stewart Radio, Book Radio, The Halloween and Christmas Channels, and Neil Diamond Radio.  My girlfriend and I liked cruising down 23d Avenue just so we could listen to Howard Stern.  We went 5 miles out of our way for ice cream, just to listen to old Howie rant.  That gave me a lot of fuel for thought, too.  At one point, I wrote a post that was read on Morning Live.  My latest chapbook, Crazy Assed Humans: The Dolls Reply, was the result of an encounter I had with Tabloid TV and a book of poems I read on Kindle.

 

            Probably books and reading are my greatest inspirational tools.  I think I read ten books at once, and belong to two writers groups and one book group.  I never get tired of reading, and still like to go through the newspaper and magazines, even catalogs of all sorts.

 

            History books and historical novels get me to think, too.  I always second guess what I might have done if I were in that era.  Pretty soon, what I  think turns into a poem, or comes out of the mouths of my characters.

 

            By the same token, artists’ monographs are great places to get ideas.  Style, color, subject, all of them jar something in my writer’s brain.

 

            So, while I’d love to be The Madwoman in the Attic, tapping away, uninterrupted in my literary solitude, I know it isn’t possible.  My best ideas come from world interaction, and sometimes, I have to quit my books, to write my books.