Creatives of all types wander a lot. Walking, online. Because when we’re in the zone everything is a teacher. We stop thinking directly about our project and we find it in a cluster of paper cocktail umbrellas, a jazz trio on the sidewalk, a mannequin in a retail window.

For this reason, I believe it’s a fallacy that writers are primarily inspired by literature or primarily instructed by a writing teacher, group, editor or mentor. These all play a part. But the primary resource every writer needs is already inside the writer. This treasure is the unique perception of the world that each person has, and an individual way of organizing those perceptions. It’s learning to access this within ourselves that counts. It’s more than any technical skill we develop.  It is under every technical move our work will make.

A fashion designer launches his new winter line centered on the use of fake fur because one night he watched over and over again, for reasons he didn’t understand at the time, a documentary on Eskimo culture. Likewise, a German composer writes a new symphony inspired by the castles he visited in Scotland. Le Corbusier was inspired by ocean liners. The list is endless.

So we first need to learn to pay attention to what interests us, and to our own responses to things.  And then to learn how our own mind likes to organize these perceptions.  And to honor that process.  In this way we come another step closer to writing the story that we alone can produce. And that progress is golden!