Recently I've been wanting to begin working on another poem, however, I can't seem to come up with anything to write about. I mean I know there are plenty of things I could write about, but I haven't come up with anything that I've gotten truly excited over and really made me want to write a poem about it. So I'm curious, where do you guys find inspiration when you don't have any ideas?
Books, older computer games, video games, artwork, movies, and music. Though it is mostly Sci-fi or Horror, it can be from pretty much anything that I can stumble across that strikes my imagination in such a way to inspire me to write. I say give a look into Surreal Art, and see what sparks inspiration. In the very least it might help get the creative juices flowing for poetry.
Honest Answer? Music and Sex. My Poem 'From Sunset to Flies' was inspired by me watching someone sleep and some pillow talk about death. My other poems 'Sugar Cookies' & 'After Sex,' were inspired by the same event, the death of my brother. (If you read both poems, you realize the woman that appears in both poems is one and the same.) I am currently working on a poem about the excitement of undressing another person. The Narrative/short story poem, Paradise Mourned, I am writing is -in part- inspired by a dance me and someone had with one another. -OJB
Usually art, like books, movies, music, photographs, paintings... But something that gets me in a storytelling mood really, really quick is looking for old Street Photography on Pinterest, especially Vivian Maier, Saul Leiter and Robert Frank.
Nature, death and the passing of time. I'm quite a visual person and spend a lot of time thinking about the aesthetic qualities of certain words, so particular words, sentences or phrases from books or other media I like often do inspire me.
Music is generally what helps me. But really, anything that strikes me as interesting may be inspiring to me.
Staring into the night sky because it fills me with awareness of the depths of space and time. The poetry of Robinson Jeffers (his short lyrics more than his rather terrifying narrative poems), Walt Whitman, WB Yeats, and some of William Blake. The simple but beautiful sound of my twelve-string guitar. It transports me. One time, many years ago, my friends and I walked out onto the ice of frozen Stony Lake in eastern Ontario, where my family's cottage is. It was midnight and we had mugs of rum and hot chocolate with us to help keep us warm. It was silent but for the occasional creak of frozen forests around us. And we could hear a sound I'd never heard before: the waves of the lake under the ice, like soft thunder coming around the point, and cresting with a huge bang just under our feet and running off to the islands to the west of us. The peace around us with that immense power just beneath the ice combined (with the help of the rum, I'm sure) to chill me, to sweep me away, to float my heart into my brain and up beyond into the stars, to shake me in ways I'm still shaken whenever I remember it, and my pen hits the page and I forget everything except the shaking and the beauty of language. My own voice in my ears as I sing some of the oldest folksongs I know just before I crawl into bed. I'm inspired by me and my own memories, and the webs of nature that surround me.
This is the nicest thing anyone has said to me all year! Seriously, thanks muchly. It's also the nicest thing I'm likely to hear for a long, long time.
Fear, mostly. I know that you were really asking, "where do ideas come from?", and I can't answer that. I don't think anybody really understands creativity. My last best idea just popped into my head out of nowhere while I was in bed trying to convince myself I should get up. What keeps me writing, though, is fear. About a year ago, I went through some life-threatening medical stuff. I managed to come through it alive, though somewhat physically diminished, and for the first time in my life I felt my age, rather than the twenty-six I've felt since I was, well, twenty-six. I've been thinking about that feeling ever since, and it's made me realize that, while I'll almost certainly be dead within twenty years, which is bad enough, it's also true that everyone who ever knew me will be dead in a hundred years (or a little more), at which point I may as well have never lived at all. My goal, then, is to produce something that will live on beyond me and my acquaintances, and since it's too late to go to architecture school, it'll have to be a novel, or some poetry, or something that others will find meaningful and that might lead them to say, "I didn't know that Earp guy, but Christ, the boy could write." That's what keeps me applying butt to chair every morning.
For me, it's not usually lack of ideas that's the problem; it's sustaining a creative momentum that outruns my self-doubt. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but getting excited about an idea? Yeah, that's the good stuff. Honestly, you can't always rely on inspiration to fuel your creative endeavors. I know that seems counterintuitive, but the drive for creativity and associative thinking need to be flexed like muscles in order to get results. It might take some time forcing out some crap poems before you seize upon something you know to be good, but if you sit there and just wait for it to happen, you might catch lightning in a bottle now and then, but that's probably going to be it. If you want consistent results, you need to do consistent work for something as fleeting as inspiration to stick its head in the window.
Something similar happened to Anthony Burgess. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the beginning of his career and given a year to live, so he did the application of butt to chair thing every day, too. It turned out to be a misdiagnosis, and he lived a long and productive life, but that's what got him going.
I come up with my best good ideas by trying to come up with the opposite of a bad idea: I take an idea that's popular, either in fiction and/or in the real world, but that I think is dangerously wrong in some way, and I come up with a scenario which demonstrates why the idea doesn't hold water.
For my stories, I get inspiration from anywhere and everywhere; Video Games, Artworks, Music, Books, Movies, TV shows, Manga, Anime, comic books, our world History, Forums like this one....
A bit of everything. sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night to write down thoughts or dreams. Other times, I see a picture, hear a word, see a name, or watch Planet Earth and other geographical docu-series. Its funny, in one of my WIPs, the alien community wants to build a wall to keep the humans out so they could maintain their peaceful way of life.... then lo and behold, Trump started actively running for president touting "build a wall! keep immigrants out!" I looked at my piece like "if I delete it, maybe it will go away in real life!?!?" So maybe subconsciously a little bit of politics and sociology.
Suffering from mental illness myself, I’ve written a lot of non-fiction about my experiences. Recently I’m trying to get more into writing fiction, and sometimes I theme them towards mental health. I find OCD especially easy to write stories around as you can become obsessed with basically anything. I’ve written stories about a magician whose obsessions interfere with her banishing a dragon, a girl who becomes obsessed with thinking she’s hit someone with her car, and a girl who obsesses over getting skin cancer. I’m also planning to write one about a synth or android who develops OCD. Another idea I have is a time traveller who develops compulsions over time travel. I haven’t yet had success with any of them, though! I’m also writing a novel about a woman with borderline personality disorder, which takes some of my real-life experiences.
The reality. There's nothing so terrifying and magnificent than what you find in the news, or in the people around you.
I have no problem finding inspiration. The songs in my heart, the pictures when I close my eyes, the ironies in the news, love lost and love that never happened, untold paths not followed in stories I read or movies I watch, a dark smudge in a photo or a sparkle in the night... The hard part is choosing a story that is worth the time to do it justice.
I honestly draw a huge amount of inspiration from past authors I'm a fan of. Doc Smith and Dan Abnett in particular, both had a massive influence on me, both in how I decided to handle descriptions and lore and scale but also in the kind of stuff I write--mainly being Space Opera/Dystopian Cyberpunk stuff. Early 90's anime, which was filled with both btw, similarly had a massive influence on my idea of what a science-fiction setting would be. Also frankly, the Daytime Soap Operas and Teen Dramas I used to watch like a religion with my Grandmother, rest her soul. The idea of these teenagers and young folks in rocky, love-triangle strewn relationships kinda became ingrained in my mind as how a story "works".
Mainly from music and video games. I pretend the music I'm playing is somehow the soundtrack to a film I've never seen and it conjures up all kinds of imagery. The video games help to streamline what I'm seeing into potential relationships, plot lines, background settings, lore, etc... Dark Souls and the music of ISIS were the two most important for me. I recommend you listen to 'Oceanic' through some really good headphones and just try and imagine the world that the music might be the soundtrack to. It gave me so much and I hope it gives you the world, happy writing friend!
I don't tend to go looking for inspiration because then things feel forced and it's not real inspiration or a passion project so I usually fail to complete it. I just wait patiently until it strikes. In the mean time, I read. Do research. Hang out on writing forums and read others work. I just try to keep myself in writing frame of mind.
What inspires me in writing poetry are the hardships and pains that I have experienced at the hands of judgmental people.
