Inspired

Every great writer needs inspiration. Ten percent of that inspiration is the people that encourage you to continue, 40 percent comes from the things you choose to write about, and 50 percent is having a great writer to model and to learn from.

Here's my inspiration:

10%- You know who you are.

40%- The only things I ever write about are the things that I see everyday, such as Mocha Frappuccinos and horses.

50%- I was introduced to my favorite writer, a poet actually, in the second grade. His name is Robert Frost, a perfect example of someone who only wrote about what he knew. Frost has been described as an ordinary man intensified. Upon first glance his work may seem rudimentary, for his favorite subjects are things that you and I may see or be a part of daily. Yet his wisdom reflects someone who is here, been, and gone. When reading Frost's work you are being let into a much deeper world than that of the ordinary poet. Frost judges, but rarely condemns; he is fundamentally serious, but never pompous.  He accepts the world's contradictions without being crushed by them. In one of his most recent poems, The Lesson for Today, he concludes:

And were an epitaph to be my story
I'd have a short one ready for my own
I would have written of me on my stone
I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

"I had a lover's quarrel with the world." No reviewer has written, none will write, a more accurate summary of the poet's spirit. On another account Frost said of himself, "There are two types of realist. There is the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real potato. And there is the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I am inclined to be the second kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form." Frost's writing always displays the principle of "the clean potato". He isn't afraid to call it like he sees it and he most certainly has an unforgettable impact on his readers.

Cleverness, imagination, ingenuity, inventiveness, originality, resourcefulness, talent, and vision. These are all words that can easily be linked with true inspiration. You know where I find mine. What is yours?