Writing, like any form of art, is easy if one has the right inspiration. Inspiration can be a tricky matter, though. I have noticed for myself that there are times when it is easy for me to write and other times where it is more difficult. When people are just starting to create, it is often a difficult task to move beyond the enthusiasm of initial creations to a sustained and practiced habit. Many people, even those with gifts at creative skills, never move beyond the beginning stages of creation because remain dependent on feeling inspired to create rather than having the discipline to create regardless of mood, and to recognize that the habit of creation, even when is not feeling inspired, makes those creations that come about when one feels inspired even better than they would be otherwise.

What one uses for inspiration can be a deeply varied matter. Speaking for myself, since I know my own habits of creation the best, I am inspired by many different phenomena. For example, the presence of a muse may inspire poetry and prose in her honor. Likewise I find nature and ruins and battlefields to be inspiring, to reflect on life and death, history and memory. I also tend to be inspired to write (and this may not be ae good thing) by conflict and hostility, and I tend to be fairly tenacious in such circumstances. I far more greatly enjoy being a lover (however shy I may be) than being a fighter, but I have much more experience fighting than loving, which I would like to change as I have the opportunity to do so.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of inspiration that people can find. Anything that enters the mind through reflection or perception can serve to inspire someone to create. Though we all have different preferences as to what we most enjoy creating, whatever we create will express ourselves to others. While creativity can be a great way to cope with being extremely sensitive to what is around us, as well as having to cope with deeply serious matters, creativity as a coping method makes disguise greatly difficult, as our feelings and struggles become externalized, and we place enough information for others to understand us. This can be both a good and bad thing–often the intuitive insights provided by our creativity and by our reflection may be too difficult for us to apply. To give but one example (among many), the playwright Eugene O’Neill was able to deeply understand the divided nature of his own family in the dark play Long Day’s Journey Into Nighit, but he was not able to overcome the patterns of his own dysfunctional family, and he ended up repeating the example of his cruel father, sadly.

Inspiration can be a tricky matter. Some people find themselves endlessly inspired by the same sorts of things over and over again, making different creations seem rather the same after a while, because there are only so many ways to say the same thing unless one has some variety. For example, if one is a songwriter and one endlessly writes songs about rejection and heartbreak, a lot of people will eventually get tired of hearing the same problems over and over and over again. This can be true of good things as well, though I never get tired of hearing sweet messages from good friends. Everone has those sorts of creations that they appreciate the most from others, as well as those that they feel most comfortable creating themselves. Let us therefore take the time to examine what inpsires us, and see what we can do to help inspire others to create works of beauty.