Insecure Writers Support Group: Episode Lucky #13

IWSG

Boy to the howdy and welcome to I Have Stories! I am your most awesome host G.B. Miller, and for today's monthly installment, we feature the optional question of the month as our contribution to the IWSG blog hop.

Has a single photo or work of art ever inspired a story? What was it and did you finish it?

To a certain degree, yes. Not so much as a photo or work of art, but actual non-living objects have inspired me.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the early part of this century (early 00's) I was an extremely motivated writer. Didn't get published much, but got into a serious flash fiction writing groove. How serious? Serious enough to create a now closed short story blog entitled Flashing Georgie's Shorts as a home for my output.

I say roughly 90% of the short stories were inspired by a turn of a word, phrase or concept (concrete or otherwise), with the remaining 10% were inspired by inanimate objects. One such story featured a conversation between two stop signs that were perched on opposite corners of a street.

Still another was inspired by the city that I currently work in, sort of a slice of life snippet. Another was inspired by a train, and yet another by the great outdoors.

While I did write the majority of my stories to completion, only two ever got commercially published. And I'm definitely proud of that fact.

So to sum it up, while all of my stories have had various and intriguing backgrounds for inspiration, very few of them came about due to either a photo or a work of art. But, that is the beauty of having a creative mind, in that you can draw inspiration from anything, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, audio or video, and write a fascinating piece of fiction.

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