"Suicide is not poetic"

I keep a little notebook in my room and when I have an idea, or more often, a line that is stuck in my head, I write it down. It could be anything: something I overheard; something inspired by an event or things I have seen or done; or something I simply came up with out of the blue. Every now and then, I go back to this little book, just to see what's in there, and I'm always pleasantly surprised.

The last thing I wrote in there was inspired by something I'd seen on Facebook, about a week ago. It was a list of mental health issues and their resulting actions that some people think there was something cool about, basically saying that people who think there's something cool about them are idiots. Somewhere in that list, a line jumped out at me and glued itself inside my head, so I reached over to my little notebook and wrote it down immediately, knowing it wasn't going to leave my head until I'd done so.

"Suicide is not poetic," was the line. I don't know if I'll ever use this line, or if I'll ever be inspired to write something because of it. I'm a little conflicted about drawing inspiration from it, considering the whole point of the post was to say there is nothing 'cool' about such things, but then again, the post itself was ironic in that it had placed these things in a poetry of sorts. I guess with the right intentions being conveyed, I would be doing basically the same thing as whoever originally made that post.

On a related note, I drew a bit of inspiration from an experience I had over the weekend. I was at a party with some of my writerly friends from university, it was dark, and the party was located on a small farm. The back paddock was full of really tall pine trees and there was a trampoline. We wandered up to the trampoline in the dark, save for our glow sticks and occasionally our phone lights, and we sat on the trampoline chatting away. It was creepy out there, to say the least, and of course us writerly folk were speculating what would happen if it turned out we had just stepped into a horror movie. Our mistake! It wasn't all that terrifying, but part of the group supposedly headed back towards the house before the rest of us, and then we noticed people without lights moving through the trees a little later. Of course we knew it was just our friends trying to scare us, but we all played along and tried to find them. We turned our phone lights back on and started wandering in the direction their voices and silhouettes had come from... and then we stumbled upon a small grave site, where there were crosses made of sticks in the ground. Oh my, that was a little creepier than I had anticipated. I mean, I'm pretty sure it was just where some dead pets had ended up, but still! The shenanigans in the back paddock ended shortly after that and we all went back down to the house, but it was heaps of fun despite the mild creepiness and I'm sure a few of us present will write about it at some point.

Where have you gotten some of your inspiration from? 
- Bonnee

Inspired by a Song

Have you ever been inspired to write something because of a song you've heard? Or even just a part of a story?

It happened a few years ago for me. I was listening to Lips of an Angel by Hinder and the idea for a story just came to me. I'm sure the basic storyline is a cliche. The love triangle. But I always wonder how authors put their own twists on the same cliche to make it interesting, stop it from being boring and keep the readers engaged.

More recently, I've been listening to Face Down by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and it's inspiring me to write something about a woman finding her strength and standing up for herself. Or maybe not even a woman. Someone of a minority, or an underdog, a victim. Standing up and shaking off the pain. Learning to be strong.

What songs have inspired you?

- Bonnee.