With this addition to helpful writing tips, this article goes over ways to inspire yourself and create new or build upon already existing writing ideas. Sometimes it is hard to come up with new ideas to write about, often making you feel stuck. To cure this temporary inspiration shortage, here are a few tips to spark your imagination and get that pencil going.

Tip 1: Pick Up A Book

Everyone has found at least one book in their life they truly loved and felt inspired by. Using these prime examples of literature can help illuminate a pathway of inspiration. Whether it be from classics like Dracula and The Hobbit to other popular novels including Ready Player One and Fourth Wing, the themes of these books can lead to your very next story, poem, or addition of your piece of writing. When it comes to this, however, make sure your writing is of originality and not plagiarized.

Tip 2: Writing Prompts

It is easy to look up writing prompts on Google or even social media, but how many of us truly use them? These short writing prompts can help you cultivate new writing projects to aid you in developing your writing skills. Try one out that fits your style or that seems interesting to you. These can be lighthearted to action-filled prompts that start a whole new story or poem idea. It also doesn’t hurt to try a new genre to spark inspiration.

Tip 3: Memory Cache

We all have our very own stockpile of memories, whether they be our earliest, fuzzy and blurred memories or new, vibrant and bold ones. Using a memory can help boost your inspiration level and help you grow as a writer. You can also use the emotions attached to those memories to build off of when it comes to certain events you want to portray.

Humanity is strange.

It’s the spectrum of impossible ideals and theories.

Are we truly human?

What is human?

In what we do are we human?

Or is it in our thoughts?

What, of all of our words and thoughts and actions, makes us human?

Love?

Kindness?

Truth?

Is there something intangible about humanity?

One that can’t be broken down into words or concepts? 

Or is humanity a concrete grasp?

How many escape the grasp?

What is inhumanity; what is humanity; what is the difference if to err is human and yet perfection is expected of human and yet we’re not all human unless we’re perfect and yet imperfections can be inhuman and yet-

What is the difference between what is and isn’t human?

How do we dare define the concept of “human”, of “existence?”

Do we dare?

Is this why it’s so indefinable? 

Because we don’t dare define what no God has singularly defined?

Do we think ourselves to be Gods?

How can we define our fellow man?

Is the definition of Human to be written by a human or by an inhuman?

What are we in this machine?

Is the machine all that is human and Human all that is machine?

Wait, nevermind, I found all the crosswalks, I’m human.

Clove Eden thinks she forgot how it feels to be human. Sometimes she’ll just sit and stare out at the Scarrian sea, and then five hours have passed. She tries to think back to how the tide evened in and bled back out, but she truly can’t remember a difference. Sometimes she swears any fuzzy recollections resurfacing in her brain are imaginary. It’s like her doctored memories of Ursa: deeply repressed, hidden in layers of sand. Every now and then a tide within her mind creates a sinkhole, suddenly granting access to a deep, concentrated memory, sometimes so deep that it sucks her in, drowns her, and returns her to the surface with a pat on the back. Good job, kid. 

Ursa always used to tell that to Clove when she’d grappled down the Stacks, testing her footing as she descended and came back up to climb. She was destined to be a climber, and conveniently located in the largest vertical object of the ocean, but doomed to a level of risk. Ursa would never have let her girlfriend grapple the surface in the first place had it not been for Clove’s careful cartography. Clove’s willingness to map every holding and remain stringent in her own self-confidence that she could find a crevice to disappear in should security ever sporadically drop by was a kind of comfort. She fulfilled this promise until she had scaled the full height at least a hundred times. Trips down to the ocean's surface sometimes took upwards of eight days. Ursa would meet her at every level she could, silently passing between the walls and accessing the broken-down passageways to the exterior, repairing them as she went. That way, when the wind howled on the southward-facing surface, there would be no inclination that there was anything but a cement wall slicing off the colony’s access to the world. Clove would collect buckets of saltwater and allow them to evaporate until they had makeshift salt seasoning, and she harvested a mix of fish (for herself) and seaweed (for Ursa’s vegetarian lifestyle). Clove remembers this with a pang of pain. Ursa was too kind to every creature, especially Clove. Clove didn’t deserve her, and look how it ended. Sometimes she scales the cliffs, even with Ursa gone. She knows the other girl wouldn’t like it, because she only granted it on the promise of being a spotter. It took a long time to navigate the decks of the Stack, and it was just as much a journey for her as it was for Clove, though the latter did it in the freezing wind.

The brick in the tower had been sealed up, of course, but it only took a few months of erosion to wash away again. Clove knew they’d seal it back up and secure it if they had something to prove, but they’d already made their point. (Irreversibly.)

But right now, all she does is sit. She’s done all this thinking at the ocean, but she’s never felt any literal sand, except for the radiated waste at the bottom of the Stacks, the coarse texture sifting between the puffy phalanges on her suit. She stowed the Walkman under her arm during this particular outing, melting into the shadows and ducking into the enclave. The cassette played The Stranger, but frequently got stuck on Vienna, and the accordion buzzed through her ears. 

During Clove’s particularly difficult period, she’d unplug the Walkman and let the music echo off the cliff, the melody bouncing off the Stack’s shell until it became enveloped by the sea below. Clove’s neighbor once told her that he felt he was haunted by a rhythm, but the citizens, having never heard music before, assumed it was an especially rhythmic drill tool-in-testing echoing up from the Depths. Clove knew no official would be caught dead down here, at least since they’d proven their point. So she took another risk and shared the melancholy with the sea, hoping that somewhere below Ursa’s spirit could listen too (it was one of her favorites). 

Despite her family name, Clove was never the most spiritual, nor sentimental. The graphical representation of her beliefs began high, dipped low when she was separated from her mother, and exceedingly built upon her meeting the angelic Ursa before crashing down upon her…yeah. 

It was on one of these solitary days with her Walkman that Clove slipped down the broken well shaft and slid past the bushes. Rosemary and thyme branches scratched her muscular arms. She braced herself until the duct spit her out onto the balcony, the surface slightly giving in to her chucks. The wood reeked of decay and felt increasingly spongey with every benign movement, and she figured she should probably fix it soon. If Ursa were there to sit with her still, she would have fixed it right away. She would have held Clove’s hand as she grappled down the side of the Stack and affixed new paneling with her beloved toolkit. After all, what if the wood split? But she didn’t have the energy, and it didn’t seem to have a valid tradeoff. 

She thought about this somewhere on the brink of dissociation before Billy Joel’s wail waned into a sudden burst of…light. Clove gasped. 

Breaking through the marine layer was a rare glimpse of the Scarrian sun, but not glowing in its all-familiar red…in a true unobstructed canary yellow, casting gold across every silver hair across her arms and dancing through her lavender-silver braids, there was the sun from the history books. 

Clove disassociates now, but for once, she does so feeling human. She hears the piano buzz across the air and allows herself to grieve in some suppressed state of her own mind. She hugs her arms over her legs and rocks, steeling herself for a decision to come. 

As the highly-delayed helicopters come to buzz above her, leaving the landing of the obstructed, uppermost layer of the Stacks - likely to go investigate the heresy of the visible sun - she rushes inside. 

Living in the Stacks make you feel less than human. 

And Clove is done feeling that way. 

You’ve never been human. What you look like is a mystery to them because they have never seen you, save for on fragments of pottery and mosaics laid into walls destroyed by the fire of the forge of the gods. 

You were no priestess of Athena. You would not lay down your life for someone else. You were your own woman, then and now. She did not punish you for consorting in her temple. You were not in her temple in the first place and she was not the vengeful sort. She was the noble parts of war, after all, the level-headed stratagems and the valiant attempts to minimize casualties. Clear mind, spear in hand and shield in the other, owl on the shoulder with a watchful eye. Ares was the brutal parts, ripping arm from torso and joint from tendon and head from neck. Nobody liked him, save for Aphrodite, who liked him because he made her feel beautiful, as if she didn’t feel that enough. She was the goddess of love, she was worshipped by all and they all thought her beautiful. 

They took things from her, too, though. She once could fight for herself but a woman who loved could not fight, they said. Perhaps her love for Ares, her attraction, is trying to fill a gap within herself that was not always there. Perhaps she sees the brutality in him and it reminds her of the violence that once lingered within herself. 

You didn’t love Poseidon, you don’t love him now, but you wanted him that night and he wanted you. Warm tan skin illuminated with silver in the moonlight, green eyes that churned like the sea, the shiny white crest of a wave for a smile; he wasn’t hard on the eyes but then again, he was a god, none of them were. Two people having a good time, that’s all it was. 

Sure, Poseidon wasn’t the best fellow. He was frankly quite a horrible person, especially by human standards, but he didn’t force you into it, as he’d forced so many others. You’d propositioned him, that night. You weren’t a good person either. How many men had you killed? A life was a life and a candle with a trail of smoke coming from the wick was a candle snuffed out. You can turn a man to stone and you’ve done so before. What is so wrong with getting rid of trespassers, in a place they are not welcome? How have they justified your actions, now, when they have made you into a martyr? Have they forgotten or did you go mad with your curse, warped into a beast who killed only for killing’s sake?

They stripped you of your humanity, then, of your personhood. You are not a person. Does one have to be a human to be a person? Too bad you’re a gorgon, then. 

You’ve never been human. Your people are killed, your head cut off. You are no Hydra, you do not grow another head twofold. A hero, the one they think the least ugly, the least cruel, he uses your head as a weapon, turning your gaze upon those he wishes to strike dead. You didn’t live by their standards but now, you do. Your monstrousness is forgotten in favor of their definition of beauty. Gorgon, wiped away from a slate that was never meant to be clean. 

They have made your tryst into an assault, they have ripped you away from your sisters, they have made your beauty into something twisted and hideous. They rewrote your monstrousness as a curse for their own aims, their own traumas twisting your name, you’re Medusa. Your appearance is not a punishment, you love the way you look, you look like your sisters, your family. You’re powerful, you’re proud, they’ve chipped away at your body and reconfigured your form and it’s wrong, it’s all wrong! 

They have carved a statue of you killing the boy who killed you. You hold his head aloft, you hold a sword. You are made into a symbol of ideals you do not embody. These ideals are not yours. They have been tied to your hands. 

Are you not your own person? Can you not refuse a gift that is unwanted? 

These are not yours, you do not want them. Why are you made to embody something that is not yours, how can you be made into a martyr for a cause you never died for? 

They attempt to give you back your agency, after stripping it away as one would peel the bark away from wood, and they give it back wrong. It has been warped. You must be the damsel in distress to be strong, beautiful by their standards. You must be hurt to be vengeful. To make your own choices, you must give up and become their supplicant. 

You are not human. 

You have never been human. 

You will not live by their standards. 

You are Medusa.

Human.

Is that what I am?
Flesh and bone held together

By wells of marrow and glue.

Is it enough?

Joy.

Is that what I feel?

When summer nights

Are feathlight kisses

On scarred hands and

Bruised knees.

Anger.

Do all see red?

When chains that singe skin

Clamp around tightened fists.

Eyes molten, mind driven.

Sadness.

Why is everything grey?

Why does the world dim,

When all I want is light?

The world sings its wail,

Its cry to space,

A mournful tale.

What am I?

With these emotions welled deep.

Locked away, forgotten

Out of reach.

Who am I?

Feeling yet again.

A rattle in my chest,

A fuzzy warm

In this vessel.

Human, is who I am. 

I am the daughter of brokenity, of bruises and disaster

a broken vase filled with thorned roses and regrets

a mess of eons gone and centuries wasted 

I am the daughter of beauty, of love and well wishes 

a kiss of bliss with all the discrepancies of well endowed silence

an embrace of tight need and apologies gifted 

I am the daughter of death, of ends and darkness 

a shadow of doubt and agony 

a black stain on a silver dress and cut string 

I am the daughter of life, of beginnings and light

a water ripple danced with honeysuckle blooms 

a breath of fresh air and freedom gleams

I am the daughter of will, of might and pride 

a stubborn mule against the raging tides

a heavy hand and loud voice

I am the daughter of cowardice, of fear and running shoes

a ladybug flying away from winter rains

a shy cluster of desperation ready to flee and spook 

I am the daughter of all, of everything and anything

a painting of colors scattered in organization and disarray 

a nervous ball of energy and movement 

I am the daughter of naught, of nothing and no one

a void of empty feelings and stillness

a cold sense of sadness and nothing to buoy 

I am the daughter 

a daughter

a human.