I have been trying to lose weight for my health and also because I just want to look better and feel better. I've been about 50 pounds overweight for several years. For exercise, I usually walk at my local mall. I guess people like me who do that are known as "mall walkers". Yesterday, I was walking in the mall, and ahead of me I saw a tall, older gray haired lady holding hands with a smaller, shorter gray haired lady who looked older than the first lady. I'm assuming that it was her mother. They were also walking for exercise, but they were walking very slowly I'm assuming because of the mother being so fragile. While I was watching them it occurred to me that maybe the mother was either getting over an illness and was trying to get some exercise to help in her recovery. I started thinking about how when we are born, we are the babies and our parents take care of us in every way. They feed us, diaper us, clothe us and take us to our first days at school. Then we grow up and begin to get older ourselves. In the meantime, our parents begin to get older and eventually, near the end of their lives, they begin to become like babies again. They need someone to help feed them, diaper them sometimes, and clothe them. The parents become the children and the children become the parents. It's sad when you think about it, but it's just the life cycle. It's observations like this that inspire me to write poems and stories.
I took a creative writing class once at the college where I used to work. What we did in the class was write stories or essays and read them out loud in class and our classmates and teacher would critique them. I wrote a story once about something that I had observed while driving. One day there was a truck in front of me and I noticed that there was a man and a woman in the truck. The man was talking and waving his hands around almost as if he were fussing or arguing with the woman. While he was doing all this, she was sitting as far away from him as she could get and her body language said it all. She practically had her back to him and had her nose up against the window and you just knew that she was trying to shut him out and wished she was anywhere but there in the truck with him. It was obviously an argument and I wrote my paper about it and speculated on what they could have been doing and arguing about. After I read my paper, one of my classmates critiqued it and I don't really remember everything he said, but one thing I do remember is that he felt that watching other people is kind of nosy. After he finished his critique, our teacher said that that is what writers do. They observe everything and everybody. Discreetly of course, but it's how we get our ideas for stories and poems.
I have read many interviews with lots of authors and almost all of them say that they just listen and observe and write down interesting pieces of conversations and things like that to use in a future story or poem. Also, by reading magazines and newspapers, we can write down interesting words and phrases that inspire us that we want to use. I don't think that's plagiarizing as long as we don't use the words verbatim and just use them for inspiration.
I mentioned in my first post that I have written some poetry. One of the things that inspires me, is to use poetry magnets. I have several sets of the magnets and I have a magnetic board. Sometimes I just put several words up on the board and move them around until something comes to mind. It's a very interesting way to come up with a poem.
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