Where Do Writers Find Their Inspiration?

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by Parmigianino, 1524.

Sometimes at literary festivals and book events people ask me where writers find their inspiration and new ideas.

‘Anywhere and everywhere,’ I say. ‘Even this moment, this small and ordinary moment that we are part of has plenty of magic, creativity, poetry within. Every day, we walk past thousands of ideas for new novels, new poems, new stories, new films. But we have to slow down to be able to see them. If we are constantly rushing from one appointment to the next or worrying about whether we will succeed or win it means we are not really seeing what is present around us. We have to become listeners to be able to hear.’

There is a widespread perception, mostly amplified by all those heavily edited photos and videos circulating on social media, that for inspiration to strike, you need to be transported into a lovely picturesque landscape: ideally, an elegant, cosy room with a well-organised desk overlooking some breathtakingly beautiful scenery, like a lush countryside with daffodils or the sea in multiple shades of blue, as you type your sentences to the sound of the waves in the background.

But that is a myth. And it simply is not true.

Inspiration comes from within —and from everywhere. Every corner of the universe. It has nothing to do with pretty, scenic settings or panoramic views.

You can write a brilliant book in a dimly-lit, cramped and smelly flat listening to the sound of garbage trucks, endless traffic and your neighbours shouting at each other yet again, while you can’t help watching a cockroach edge its way along a crack in an old, stained wall. Sorry if that sounds unromantic. But it is all in our heads—all those codes of “prettiness” and “ugliness”. One is not necessarily more conducive to creativity than the other.

What a writer really needs is a space of their own, small or big. It makes zero difference whether that space is pretty or not.

What a writer needs is time of their own.

And if possible, emotional, financial, cultural support. A touch of love.

Freedom, above all.

The freedom to write.

That is all.

Cemeteries are places of inspiration. Every writer or poet should make it a habit to visit them regularly. In whichever city or country we might happen to be, we must go and appreciate the cemeteries. Take time to sit on a bench quietly, inhale the air and listen to the wind. So many stories are buried there. So many silences too.

When I used to live in Istanbul, many moons ago now, I would, time and time again, walk into one of the ancient graveyards and sit there for a while on my own. The Mevlevi cemetery in Galata was welcoming, as were the Armenian cemetery in Sisli, the Jewish cemetery in Ortaköy or the steep graveyard by the Bosphorus University where many poets, writers and artists were buried since the Ottoman times…. and then there were the tombs of the saints scattered here and there all across the city, I would perch on the sidewalk by their shrines, watching the people passing by.

But there was one cemetery that was like no other and moved me profoundly. Located on the outskirts of the city, out of sight. In Turkish they called it ‘The Cemetery of the Companionless’. Unlike all the other graveyards that I visited in here there were no marble tombstones. No names or surnames. No epitaphs. No flowers brought in by loving, caring visitors. In fact, no visitors. Instead there were only numbers. Row after row of placards with hastily scribbled numbers on them.

Sometimes, with the passage of time, under the sun and the rain and the snow, these numbers would start to fade. Then there would be nothing left to distinguish one grave from another.

The people buried in this unusual place were almost always the outcasts, the unwanted, the unloved. Among them were many who had died of HIV related illnesses during the 1980s and early 1990s. Due to the massive stigma of AIDS in Turkey at the time, they had been sent here, buried without a funeral, without a proper burial rite. There were also many abandoned babies who had been found dead on the streets. And there were many citizens from LGBTQ minorities who had been ostracised by their own families, shunned and pushed to the periphery. There were a number of prostitutes too. And suicides who had been denied a decent burial. And then there were refugees. So many migrants who had lost their lives while trying to cross the Mediterranean or the Aegean Sea to build a new life for themselves and their families had been interred here.

It was an incredibly sad and solemn place where an Afghan refugee might be buried next to a Turkish trans woman or a Kurdish abandoned baby and so on.

It was a place where human beings became numbers.

I wrote a novel called Ten Minutes Thirty Eight Seconds in this Strange World. It is about a sex worker named Tequila Leila. On the first page the reader knows she is dead. Her heart has stopped beating, but her brain is active for another few minutes. 10 minutes 38 seconds to be precise.

The world we live in is full of hierarchies.

Literature gently but firmly dismantles the “ranking”, the pecking order. For a writer there are no glass walls, no dualities.

As I was writing this novel I realised, broadly speaking, we have two types of families in this life. The “blood family” and the “water family”.

If our first family is caring, kind and tender we should count our blessings. But we must never forget that not everyone is as lucky. Especially for those who have not received from their families the love and the care that they deserved, the existence of another family—a water family— becomes extremely important.

Our water families are composed of our dear friends. Not all of them. Not dozens and dozens. Maybe six or seven people at most. These are the witnesses of our journeys and we are the witnesses of theirs.

Each and every human being who had been unfairly turned into a a scribbled number in that forsaken cemetery in Istanbul had dreams and aspirations. A story of their own. And many of them also had a water family. One thing is certain: they were not ‘companionless’ and they were not numbers.

So this Sunday, if you are seeking inspiration for a new book, a new poem, a new story, or a new film, please slow down and look around. Creativity is not hiding in some luxuriant, elegant, polished setting. Creativity is present in everything, and everywhere, but all too often, in the most undervalued and unloved places.