My best inspiration for writing

The other day I read a blog article about finding inspiration for your writing. Called 3 Techniques to Coming Up With Great Ideas, it is by Jody Calkin, who has a great blog on writing.  Check it out, she has many great tips for writers!

After reading her tips (and trying out the first one) I remembered one of my own great sources of inspiration: Read something.  Read everything.  Read anything.  Just read.

I'm not claiming to have invented this, by the way.  I've seen in mentioned several other places.  But it definitely bears repeating.

When I write, I tend to get caught up in my own little world.  And that world, just like the big one around me, needs outside stimulus.  I find the best way to get that is to read what others have written.

Personally, articles are my favorite.  I love books of all shape, size and genre, but I tend to get caught up in them.  The next thing I know, it's dinner time and I haven't gotten anything done all day.  If I have a deadline, I need to stay away from the library!  But between my email inbox and the blogs I follow, I have an abundant supply of idea generating materials.

Short snippets of information, like articles, blog posts, even Facebook and Twitter, can really get the creative juices going.  Well-written pieces give me inspiration and help increase my own technical ability; pieces that are less well-written make me want to edit them, which is also a useful practice-writing exercise.

It doesn't matter what I read about.  I never know what's going to spark an idea.  For instance, the most interesting thing I've read so far today is Your Grandmother was a Neanderthal.  Now, I don't know if I'll ever use the topic of the article, which is about our DNA and the ancestral link to a now extinct species.  Not exactly what I write about normally...  But you never know when it will spark something. 

In a roundabout way, I suppose you could say that because that article made me think about how I could use it, and made me examine why I wanted to write about it at all, it helped inspire this blog post. 

Seriously, you just never know where those ideas are lurking...