What inspired you to start writing?

I had asked a few of my writer friends and fellow bloggers to give me a paragraph or two about what had inspired them to begin writing. Like always you'll get to see what inspired me to begin writing at the end of this post followed by an after thought.

Tricia Drammeh, The Claiming Words

My inspiration for writing comes from all around me: music, nature, a snippet of overheard conversation. But, I would have to say my biggest inspiration comes from other authors. I've read so many wonderful books over the years - books that made me laugh, cry, think, and dream. For years, I read everything I could get my hands on. The ingenuity and imagination these authors displayed never ceased to amaze me. The only thing more thrilling than holding a brand new book in my hands is the rush of joy I experience when I finish writing a novel, poem, or even a blog post.

Gerry McCullough, Belfast Girls (For the UK), Belfast Girls (For the US)
Why I started writing.
Do you know, I can’t even remember when I discovered that writing was something I loved to do? Since I first learned to read, I’ve tried to write as well. It just seems to have been a basic instinct, to try to do something which gave me such pleasure when others did it. I began by writing prose. I didn’t attempt to write poetry until I was in my teens, and then it was a very private process. But I wrote stories from early childhood, and made up plays for my friends and myself to act out as a regular game. At that time, I was happy to share what I’d written. Later I became very secretive about my prose writing, too, and would only show my stories to my close family. My poetry and my prose fulfill different creative needs. My poems come mainly from a desire to create beauty by putting words together. My stories exist because I have the urge to create characters and to write about their lives. But having said that, the distinction isn’t always so clear-cut. Some of my poems are about people; and I certainly want to use words to create effects in my prose as well as in my poetry.

Belfast Girls was my first full-length novel. I had written novels before – but this was the first published one, and it gave me a marvelous sense of achievement! Growing up, as I did, during the troubles, I was very aware that all over the world there was a very simplistic view of what was happening in Northern Ireland, i.e. people seemed to believe that all Catholics thought one thing, and all Protestants thought something else, and that all Catholics hated all Protestants and vice versa. I knew that wasn’t true. It was so much more complex than that. Many on both sides of the divide were horrified at what was happening and only wanted peace and reconciliation. I wanted to write something to show, without lecturing, that ordinary people in Northern Ireland had no problem with each other – it was just a small percentage who were fighting. By the time the book was finished, the troubles were over, so I rewrote it to reflect the same thing in the current climate. Of course, like any writer, I also just wanted to write a book, whatever it was about. And I wanted to create characters who had something of me in each of them, and write about them. Since then I’ve had two more books published and a collection of short stories.

Melanie Dent, http://lynchcliffe.wordpress.com/lynchcliffe-kindle-store/
I have been writing since childhood and had a few poems published over the years but I always wanted to write a novel.

The idea for the Lynchcliffe Cuckoo series came quite literally from nowhere and it is the first book idea I ever followed through on. I also used it to help me work through losing my partner, David, back in 2008. The series is dedicated to his memory.

Katrina Jack, Land of Midnight Days
What inspired me to write?
Believe it or not it wasn’t reading other authors work, but an old green covered diary. As a kid, I read all the usual children’s fiction available at the time, such as Enid Blyton, C .S Lewis and so forth. I always used to go to bed at night, my head filled with stories I’d made up. I would even enact some of them using my dolls and teddies. Then the fateful day arrived when I was inspired to put pen to paper for myself. I was about 14 at the time and someone gave me an old, leather bound diary, the type with blank pages. I didn’t have much of a social life at the time, so decided to put it to a different use and filled it with short stories and drawings. That was it, I was hooked and over the next few years graduated to full blown novels and I owe it all to that tatty old diary.



As for me, there was no set day or time that inspired me to start writing. Though there are times that gives me the inspiration to pick up my pen or in this case my computer and begin writing a book or short story. I'll get to this part later and as I have said there was never a set time or date that inspired me to start writing. I was sitting one day and I was terribly bored so I decided to pick up a pen and paper and started to write. I had no idea of what kind of plot I wanted or nothing, so i just began writing. This writing, I found, gave me something to do because it flowed easily and it seemed to take on a life of it's own. Thus began my writing of books and until recently, I did only as a hobby.

As for the times that give me the inspiration to write, they can be anywhere from going to bed to waking up in the morning. They also come to me when I'm watching a movie, reading a book, watching the news or just sitting and watching the leaves falling from a tree during the fall. It all depends on what I'm doing at the moment and they are few to many in between.



After thought: We've seen how each of us has come into writing. Whether it was for fun, started at an early age or for therapeutic  reasons or just as a hobby. We all know one thing for sure, once we started writing, we found ourselves not being able to stop.

Happy writing everyone.