Prompt: What inspires your creativity?
I love this prompt because it lets you reflect on the source of your creative ideas. Where do your best ideas come from? What is your inspiration for what you do?
At the risk of sounding self-absorbed, my past experiences inspire my creative ideas. For me, creativity looks like writing. It's my favorite pastime, although I've only recently started sharing it with the world.
On the surface, I think my life probably seems relatively uninteresting. What kinds of experiences does a stay-at-home mom in the suburbs have to inspire something meaningful? Plenty, it turns out, largely related to motherhood - how it changes you and the way you see the world.
But beyond this, I find my creative ideas linked to my experiences from a lifetime ago - Before the suburbs, before becoming a mother, before everything that defines me now.
So much of what I write is inspired by the years I spent living and teaching public school in New York City. I saw parts of the city that many transplants never encounter, even after years in the five boroughs.
Sometimes, it felt like I lived in a different place from my professional friends, who hardly had a reason to venture from the safety of gentrified neighborhoods and their frequented hangouts. I don't blame them. I'm sure I would have been the same if I hadn't become a public school teacher, working daily with our city's least fortunate and most vulnerable.
Beyond the city, my life in my hometown shines through whenever I sit down to write. Although much has changed for me and the place I came from, little can overshadow 21 years in a small beach town and the bonds we forged there. The friendships in my fiction are based on those in reality, growing up alongside one another, from diapers to bachelor's degrees. We learned, loved, and lost together, and so do my characters.
There is little beauty in the world compared to an untamed ocean unless it is the quiet of a still bay reflecting the fading sun. I was fortunate enough to grow up within this landscape, broken only by swaths of green forests and small-town charm. Today, much of this has been paved over and knocked down to make way for manufactured scenery. But, I guess that is the way of things in our world.
Anyway, I like this prompt because it lets me trace elements of my stories to my past. Even when the connections aren't crystal clear, you can still find them. They are in the way I describe a rising moon, or the characterization of two best friends, or young love. It's always there.
What inspires your creativity? Where do your ideas come from? Take a stab at this prompt for a little bit of self-reflection!
Thanks for reading. Drop a comment to join the conversation.
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