User blog comment:Anarchic Operations/Sources of Inspiration/@comment-26475800-20160618002018

I disagree with a lot of what you said. I believe that Mike said a lot of truth in what he wrote. Telling people not to take inspiration for other people's work is just a cop out to get out of reading. I draw a lot of inspiration from reading. If I'm reading something, the author may just mention something small and insignificant to the story, but that one little thing would create a whole story about it.

You also do make some good points with drawing inspiration from real life. Sometimes a story is strong enough to make someone feel so strong about what they are reading that they can't put the book down. In my experience, those stories have some real world inspiration. It's funny though, because some of the stories that I've written are based on a bunch of things. I'll give two examples of a story that I've written from both kinds of inspiration.

Bedtime for my Daughter which I don't think is my best work, but has been narrated more than any of my other stories, comes from real life. I have two children, and when I wrote that story my daughter did stay up later than I would have liked. That's about all the real life inspiration for that one.

Voice Messages is from a skit on a CD I listened to not that before starting to write that. I fell this is one of my better stories on this site, although I can say all the stories I've posted here were because I was lazy and didn't edit them. In my own opinion, this story is much better than the first, but that's just me.

As for as other stories, The Great Gastby, was just a retelling of Romeo and Juliette. That is one of the best stories around, despite if you like the genre or not. It is fabulously written and is hardly anything like Romeo and Juliette, besides it is a romance story.

I've also pulled inspiration from non-fiction books, which is a great way to get inspiration. The best example is no longer on the site, because it is looking like it will be bought by a mag. It was titled Spirit Bottles, it can still be found at creepypasta.com.

Also, sometimes inspiration comes from nowhere. Withdrawals was pulled out of the air. I honestly don't know where that idea came from.

As of right now, the story I am writing is based on something I saw on youtube and thought it was a great idea for a story. I'm also editing something based on real life, but with all of those examples, the inspiration only gave me the smallest amount of an idea to work with. The rest of it just creates it's self.

There is also, a little bit of real life in every story I write. It doesn't matter how strange or dark it seems, there is a little bit of something that had either happened to me, or I experienced in everything that I write. It give the characters more depth. So in that regards I agree with you. But, if you don't draw inspiration from writing, such as how the best way to phrase a sentence, than you're not going to make it that far as an author.