What’s your writing inspiration?

I love reading author interviews and speaking to other writers about what inspires them. I think there are as many different thoughts on writing inspiration as there are writing styles.

For me, I find my writing inspiration tends to cluster around a few areas:

• Travel – always. I’m an unrecovered traveloholic, and will remain so until the day my body can no longer manage long journeys. Nothing sparks my imagination more than being in a new place, learning about new cultures and traditions, hearing another language, eating new foods, visiting fascinating cities or simply people watching in this new environment.

• History – I love history, and I love visiting sites from the past and reading history books. I also love to imagine what life was like in another time: what people wore, what they ate, how they lived, what their aspirations were. I enjoy creating stories with contemporary and historical storylines, and I have so much fun writing these and researching aspects of my stories set in another period.

• Exercise – ideas rarely come to me as I’m sitting at a desk. I live in a city and (unlike most Romans) rarely drive my car. I walk everywhere and these are great times for writing reflection and brainstorming. Likewise, I do lots of sports that are good reflection time for me – swimming, hiking, skiing, mountain biking. I like jogging, too, but I’ve never been successful at combining jogging time with hashing out story ideas, although I know many other people swear by it.

And what about you, writers? What inspires you? Do you notice patterns for your writing inpspiration? Things that always/never work for you?

Here’s to wishing year-long writing inspiration to us all…