Where Do Writers Get Their Ideas?
An honest question from my 11-year-old sparked the article I am writing today: Where do writers get their ideas? She was reading a series by Jennifer A. Nielsen when she stumped me with this query. Is it different for everyone? Where does creativity come from? Can we harness inspiration?
I believe that we can, yes, but not necessarily in the ways that we have been taught. The internet tells us that creativity has to be meticulously scheduled and mapped out to flourish. But in my experience, I’ve learned that the opposite is true: Rather than struggling to capture ideas, we sometimes need to slow down and simply exist.
Cutting through the Noise
To answer my daughter, I had to start with myself and consider where my own ideas come from—and more pressingly, where they are right now.
I restarted a free online journaling app this year called 750words.com. As the name suggests, the goal is 750 words a day—and if you do it, you get digital confetti. It doesn’t sound amazing or life-changing, but I assure you, it has been. I just dump everything I am worried about in there, which I’ve been doing every day since January 1st.
I’ve noticed lately that I am starting to write some juicy lines in between the repeated complaining and raging about the state of the world, not to mention my own personal problems. I am cutting through the external and internal noise—not always, but often enough to notice.
Slowly but surely, I can feel that my entries have started to slow down, get deeper. There is inspiration in getting comfortable with an empty white page. There is a benefit to throwing out the junk thoughts, like mowing the lawn before we plant a new tree.
After my 750 words, feeling depleted and happy, I turn to the work of maintaining a household with children. Laundry is started. Plants are watered. Pets are fed. Kids are started on their allotted screen time for the day. I have a notebook nearby, and there is a storm outside, lightning crackling and thunder growling. My small gray cat is sitting on the windowsill, gazing out at the storm moodily like a detective in a 1950s black noir film.
This is how I wrote my latest (unpublished) poem, “The Cat and the Storm.”
Is it any good?
It doesn’t matter.
Writing as Release—and Renewal
Writing this poem was cathartic, a release of stuck emotions that had been bottled up inside my chest for weeks. That dopamine high of hitting the metaphorical finish line after a challenging run.
How did I get the idea for that poem? How does a green leaf hold the sunshine? The poem flowed out of me because I reconnected to silence, to stillness. To boredom even. I didn’t worry about having a great idea for a poem. I just wrote what was happening right now.
Writing can be both an act of release and of renewal. Allow yourself to let go of expectations, disappointments, arguments, whatever has your thoughts in a chokehold. Let something new come through you to connect you to the here and now.
Life is lived in these small moments. The painful, the frustrating, the beautiful, and yes, the boring.
Inspiration as a Matter of Perspective
So what actually inspired me, in the moment that I wrote my recent piece? I could say the sounds of the storm inspired me. I love a good storm. I could say it was the image of my gray cat sitting in the window, staring at the gray sky and the bright green grass.
But the truth is, I had two things going for me that day. One, I was feeling some pretty gnarly feelings that had been simmering for a while. Two, I actually had time to process those feelings through writing, once I’d cut through some of the external noise via journaling.
If you’re reading this and thinking…I have both of those things! I’m troubled and either unemployed or underemployed! Or, I am working a service job like nursing or teaching, built on the backs of thousands of hours of unpaid labor, and I barely have time to sleep, let alone write… Great! You’re ready to write! (And no, those situations aren’t really great, but we’ll dismantle the patriarchy another day, okay?)
Like meditation, like reading, writing stops time: It takes you out of the blurred edges streaming past and allows you the perspective to feel what the water is doing around you. Is it a strong, fast flow? Are you barely hanging on? (Me, that is me.)
This shift in perspective is a form of inspiration in and of itself. Writing asks us where we are going and forces us to look around us to answer it. When we gain perspective—on our personal life, on the world around us—we sometimes find that we can access ideas that previously didn’t occur to us.
You might be thinking, Ange, are you telling me writing poetry can CHANGE MY LIFE? Yes. I am. Try it and let me know if it doesn’t.
Poetry is focused attention, imagination, and courage. And isn’t that the only response to anything wrong in our lives? Writing is the creative equivalent of arming ourselves for war, whether that’s the war to get a toddler’s swimsuit on or the battle to push back on the eroding rights of women in America. When you consider it from that perspective, what other choice is there but to write, even when we don’t feel like it?
The Trifecta of Writing Authentically
The day I wrote my storm poem, I had found some old photos of a relative who had passed away a long time ago. I never met her because she took her own life before I knew she was even out there. I can’t stop wondering what might have been. How different my life would have been if I had known she was out there. How different might hers have been? Could I have helped? Would she still be alive if I had looked for her earlier?
I was already feeling overwhelmed that day by a new job. With my daughter starting a new school next fall on top of that, I was wondering if I was up to the challenge of it all. To make matters worse, I’d just turned off a podcast about how we are now not at war—well, we are at war, but it’s not a war—actually, it is a war, but it’s almost over—actually, it was never a war, only a skirmish, and now that is almost over.
Then I saw some pictures of this relative who had passed that I had never seen before, and that feeling of wishing I could go back in time and change things hit me hard. It was the final drop of turmoil in the whirlpool of my life, sucking me down into my feelings, which is a place I do not enjoy being, to be frank.
That day, I was home. I had time to feel these things, rather than push them under. I put down my iPad. I turned my chair toward the window and the cat, watched the storm, and wrestled with how to put all these emotions in order. It is the joy of my life to create something from nothing. Out of the messy insides of my heart comes a poem, marching out onto the orderly, bright white lines of the page.
From this, I learned once again that the three things we absolutely need to write are a little free time, some heavy (or joyful!) emotions, and courage. And that is the secret to a happy life in the most wonderfully ordinary sense. Moments of joy stolen back from the gods of bad moods and horrifying headlines.
Build the Bones of Your Inspiration on Attention
Build the bones of your inspiration on attention to yourself, your life, and your own wants and needs. Does that sound selfish? It’s a radical idea. The world is slowly sliding into oblivion, and you want me to love myself? To choose self-care? I want us to choose creativity—to choose rage, or gentleness, but to express it. To choose attention, imagination, and courage. Let’s build our lives on that.
The world needs honesty, but more importantly, we need joy. Life isn’t supposed to be a series of struggles with no upsides and no way out. Yes, we are at a time when everything feels unstable, from inflation and oil prices to our 250-year-old institutions crumbling before our eyes.
But start writing anyway. Start taking back your life. One attentive moment at a time. From there, you’ll discover inspiration.
If I had to tell you where to get your ideas, I’d tell you to write something every day—to find creativity in the quiet moments, to pull poetry out of the turmoil of your inner world. If you catch a thread of a word or two that might sound good together, write it down. Inspiration finds us in that contradictory place between stillness, attention, and action.
This article was published on June 23, 2026. Written by:
Grounding the Creative Body
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