Are you inspired?

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
– Vincent Van Goh

I have been thinking a lot of about inspiration recently. Maybe because sometimes it feels as if everything is inspiring me, while other times it feels like I have lost my ability to see the wonder around me.

My Work in Progress inspires me. Every day I wake up anxious to see what will happen next. While I have a detailed outline (as per last week’s post), most of the time I feel as if I am merely taking dictation from someone else.

I also wonder who that someone else is, that source of all creativity.

Sometimes, I start off inspired and then find myself hopelessly lost, wind-tossed on a rough sea, unable to see land. When I have tried to plow through that mist of confusion I seem to only get myself more lost. Sometimes, you just have to put things away for awhile and come back to them.

Sometimes you never do.

For me, the greatest source of inspiration is the what-if question.

What if a girl and her best friend find a bag of money in a baseball dugout? What if her little brother won’t leave them alone as they try to solve the mystery, for they are certain there is a mystery…

That’s the basic premise behind It’s a Mystery, Pig-Face! I was sitting around thinking about my childhood and how my friends and I were always wanting to solve mysteries. If someone looked at us sideways, it was a mystery.  A few years later and many revisions later, a book was born.

I am already percolating on a new story idea, and this one arrived via my twitter feed. I won’t share it yet because it’s the merest wisp of any idea, but if all goes well, it will take root.

For about 3 months last year I felt as if I’d lost all inspiration. Blame it on the Sophomore book blues, but I just felt like I was out of gas.

The only solution: rest and reading.

Reading really good books by really good writers is ALWAYS inspirational.

What inspires YOU?