What Is Your Working Practice?

The writing tends to find me rather than the other way round, but I've been thinking lately that maybe it's arrogant to expect inspiration to hit - and stupid too, because I panic in the intervals when it's absent.
I've tried to sit down and take an object or an element of my surroundings and just write about it, to get the juices flowing and hopefully improve my descriptive skills, but I can't get it to work.
If I'm 'in the zone' I need to not be interrupted while I jot the notes down, but other than that I can and have written everywhere. Obviously, the handwriting standard drops when I'm walking or on the bus at the same time haha.
Nothing beats pen and paper for those frenzied moments...BUT let's take a second to praise the mobile phone for those times when there's no pen handy and you saved your ideas as a text [good for in the middle of the night too, because phones light up so you don't have to get out of bed].

My writing inspiration comes out a bit like preheated congestion. I sneeze until I'm sore. It's a little like Gil, being I need the comfort in understanding the things that live in my head. I need others to too. And If I am depleted it is only because I have stopped myself from further living--by my own interpretation.

I appreciate what others have said. I can write on the computer and generate ideas, but usually my most unique observations occur when I'm out and about, sans laptop. I once wrote a series of poems about riding the bus. I forced myself to write while commuting to work. Very interesting. Lately, I hate to admit, I'm not very disciplined. That's why I jumped at the invitation to join this site. I believe I will be more productive with an audience, a forum, and occasional feedback. We'll see how true that proves to be.

Often, I also get inspired after seeing/hearing/listening to other artists, writers, musicians, etc.

Bottom line, ya gotta balance inspiration with perspiration. Or, as Jack London said, "You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club."

i wrote a couple about riding the bus, or at least about the bus terminal. those are the ones you have to write on the back of envelopes, because you aren't prepared. got me to buy a small notepad to carry everywhere.

having something to say inspires me to write. so if i'm upset, or angry, or in need of expressing something like love, or something that i feel strongly about that i cannot vocalize to the point of change, then it gets written.

sometimes other peoples poems inspire me to write. sometimes peoples ideas inspire me to write usually i just write when i feel i need to say something.

A black pen and white paper usually does the trick. I get my inspiration from bumping into the world around me with my ear, my eyes, my nose and sometimes with my forehead . . . a few times, even with my cock. Eh?

Anything I experience flows into me, and for reasons I cannot yet understand, some experiences get caught within the web of my analytical mind. I analyze and play with those experiences as if they were toys couched in the English language. I have an ear for music, too, which I find in the words and lines I use.

So, inspiration is taken into me, set to my own personal beat of my own language, and cast out into the public after several revision which, I hope, make my writing a bit more universal and less enigmatic and isolationary.

I think I suffer from some bizarre synesthesia, words just come to me, they come rather abstract and with my pen I try to make them a tad more concrete.
I usually always have music on when i write and sometimes I can only write certain passages when I listen to something specific; especially Bruckner's 9th symphony is important, has a rather interesting swell of emotions that often helps me unveil my thoughts. I have trouble visualizing things, ask me to describe something I never can, I guess that is why musical flow stimuales me so much.

I agree with Wendy about reading other people's work; it can get you thinking and then you branch off.
If I haven't written any poetry for a while and am in that panic-zone, I grab a volume of Larkin or something and settle in to be inspired.

It kind of works 2 ways. Either
- the content of what you're reading inspires you to write
or
- the quality of what you're reading makes you aspire to be as good as the writer

Has anybody seen Michael Bauer around lately? My writing practice is forgetting and just letting the clickety clack take over. Then I go back and edit it and add linebreaks and put it my website. It's fun.

Often what sparks my writing is reading something by another writer. Sometimes i only get into a paragraph or 2 of their story/poem & it sends me off. Often i never go back to finish their work. I go & flow, inspired & delighted, riding the current to a fruitful ending. No, i do not steal from said tale, because my mind is sent flooding elsewhere. I am so influenced by what i read.