Inspiration: From where do you get those stories?

The first serious attempt I made at writing a short story was about three years ago, though I had enjoyed writing long before that. The story that happened was entirely out of my own experiences, tweaked here and there to make it fictional. For a first attempt, it turned out reasonably well and was published in the Sunday Literary pages of an Indian newspaper. I had praise from my teachers and my friends and my family. The problem began after that.
Once you are published, you want to do it again. But for that, you need to have a story. I did not have a story. I mean, okay, I wrote one story out of my own life, but life isn’t exactly what you would call blockbuster material! My mother told me- look around you, read the newspapers…you’ll find your plots somewhere. Well, I looked around, and I read the newspapers, and I didn’t know what to write about. I read stuff in the newspapers, and thought- I don’t really know these people, how could I write about them?
Well, till then I had really believed that stories just happened to you. You had this brilliant moment of inspiration, and then the plot started forming in your head, and you would take out your pen and paper and voila! What I didn’t realize was that inspiration was around me already, that I only had to train myself to learn to recognize it.
But meanwhile, I had a few poems published here and there, and I wanted more than ever to have another story published, and so I attempted to carve out stories out of anecdotes I heard from friends. They were not very good, but they gave me some practice. And then, one day I learned about the 50 Stories for Pakistan anthology via facebook. They were looking for submissions, and I decided to take my chance. Trouble was, I still didn’t have a story, and the deadline was very close. So I just took my notebook and pen and started with the description of a hot, desert noon. I had recently visited Rajasthan, and my starting image was a character with a broken down car in the middle of the desert. I started asking myself questions. Who was she? Why was she here? Where was she going? What was going to happen to her now? I also had to consider a few other things- 1. The word-limit (which is why the natural description I had begun with eventually got shelved) 2. The story was not to have any sort of violence, disease or death. 3. It had to be uplifting, somhow. With these counters to play with, I worked my way through, and Promises was written, and selected for the anthology (incidentally it’s also available for free on the Ether Mobile App if anybody’s interested). Being finally able to write a story that had nothing to do with my own life gave me a lot of confidence. It made me take my writing more seriously, making it a more regular activity in my routine. And that helped me with getting hold of the ideas. As I’ve learned, ideas won’t come to you if you don’t look for them, hunt for them, toil for them. The newspaper could provide stories, but I needed to develop the eye to recognize them, because nobody was going to give me my plot ready-made. I had to pick up the images and expand them, I had to identify ideas and make them my own, I had to place myself amongst strangers and familiarize them through my writings. And these, for me, are the sources of my inspiration.

This blog post is written as a part of the 2nd Tuesday blogathon. The topic for this month was inspiration. So what would you say inspires you to write?

©Ruchira Mandal
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