Getting Inspiration

When I visit schools and libraries I spend my time telling stories and sharing my love of books, reading and writing - the idea behind this is to let the children know that reading and writing is fun. I also spend a lot of time answering lots questions about myself and writing - among other things this helps show that I'm human (for most of the time) and helps satisfies their curiosity about writers and writing. Questions range from - 

• What's your favourite colour?
• Where do you do your writing?

to things like 

• Where do you get your inspiration?   

The first two are easy.... the inspiration question often isn't so easy. Quite often what the poser of the question means is a combination of -

• Where do you get your ideas?

and 

• Where do the words that you write actually come from?

I have answers for all of these - some more satisfying than others. But every time i get asked the questions I always wish I had a better answer... the problem is, it's difficult to say where all ideas and words come from without simply saying Out Of My Head...

I've had a book idea rattling round inside my head for a little while now - I know characters and settings and bits of plot and conversation etc but I didn't quite have the words to start the story... and to be honest it was starting to get a little frustrating. 

This morning, however, whilst carefully putting our wedding invitations into the postbox round the corner, the opening words came to me. I don't know what triggered these words off - there was certainly no one around that resembled the character that I'm writing about, nor was there a building similar in any way to the one in the story... but the words still came to me. Perhaps they came because I wasn't looking for them - Who knows?

All I can say is that I'm glad they are here... It now means that I can start the story at a good place. The beginning. Always a good place to start I think...