What inspires us?

I have always enjoyed the novels of Kate Mosse ("Citadel" being my favourite); at the moment I'm reading her collection of short stories, "The Mistletoe Bride And Other Haunting Tales". In addition to the stories themselves, I'm very interested in the author's notes that accompany each one. I am always keen to know the "story behind the story" - what was it in the writer's mind that conjured up the characters, the setting, the plot?

We are told that there are only seven basic plots for all the stories in existence - overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, rebirth. But how do writers build on these foundations to create what enthrals or appals us? What sparks their imagination, what inspires them to take a theme and to weave magic with it? Perhaps something as mundane as the look on a fellow passenger's face on the bus, an overheard scrap of conversation in a cafe, a solitary walk in the woods with the dog. A rich seam that I have frequently mined has been my own family history, where fact has often proved stranger than fiction!

Worcester 1956

Recently, in my poetry group Picaresque, we each took as a starting point for a poem a female character from a myth or legend. Whilst the underlying stories might have been well known, to see how each person imbued that character with something of themselves was a revelation. I have spent a lifetime fascinated by the River Severn (witness the above photo of me on one of my early childhood visits!) and a few years ago walked the 210 miles of the Severn Way with my husband and two dogs. So who else could I have chosen as my inspiration for that poem other than Sabrina (or Hafren in Welsh), a human child vengefully drowned in the river but resurrected as a nymph

  "... in that slow, gentle spawning

between the windswept thighs

of ancient hills at the bounds

of the nightingale's song."

The infant "Sabrina" on Plynlimon

I have an "ideas book" that goes everywhere with me in the day, sits beside my bed at night. In recent years it seems to have filled up alarmingly quickly - no shortage of inspiration but a severe shortage of time to translate that into coherent, finished pieces! Perhaps most of us who are "amateur" writers are just too busy living everyday life to write as much about it as we would like to, but maybe with the advent of 2015 ....