Tuesday's Inspiration from an essay by Dorothy Unhak #aminspired

I share something with Dorothy Unhak. While taking a time out from writing to work as a nurse, I did what she did. Here's the quote. "The writer in me was compilling events, feelings, atmosphere, emotions, situations for future use."

Upon reading this essay, I realized the years I worked as a nurse did the above for me. Not that I copied anything I had experienced as a nurse in a complete fashion, bits and pieces crept into my stories. Watching my patients and their families experience emotions from grief, anger to hope and success, I had a wealth of emotions. The events I watched unfold at times formed bits and pieces of what I was writing about. The first stories were about nurses and doctors but then I began enlarging my writing world and turned to fashioning fantasy stories but the emotions I watched and sometimes experienced during the years of working in a hospital and home care situations found their way into writing about other times and places.

In many ways, a writer is a sponge soaking up all the things they witness, see, taste, smell, hear and touch become part of what they become as a writer. The moral of this little bit of inspiration is while working in other areas, just absorb what you experience. File these things away for the days when you're able to write. While working as a nurse, I wrote little but then I returned to writing a richer person, able to put some of the things I'd compilled into words on paper. Everything a writer experiences can become the seeds for a story at some future date.