Writer Wednesday - All About Inspiration...When It's Ready

Window Over The Sink 

with Liz Flaherty 

All About Inspiration...When It's Ready 

When my younger son and his wife married, they moved to Vermont the day after the wedding. Since I couldn’t keep them in Indiana forever—it’s amazing how independent kids get—I comforted myself by saying at least now I’d get to visit Vermont, which I’d wanted to do since reading Understood Betsy when I was eight or nine. (And several times since.) 

You know how sometimes you anticipate things until you’re practically jumping up and down with the great expectations that are skating wildly through your mind, only to be disappointed? Let down because...well, what actually came to pass was somehow less than you’d hoped?

Vermont wasn’t like that. 

The first time I went there―during springtime’s mud season, no less―I felt as though I’d come home. Over the next 15 years, I visited close to 20 times, and it never got old. Its beauty, culture, and the people who live there filled a huge place in my heart I never even knew was empty. Naturally enough, I wanted to place a book there. This would require several research visits, of course. So I started a story. And another.
And yet another.

What was wrong? I had the inspiration, acres and acres of it. I had people (I always get them first. Do you?). I had a story. Why wouldn’t it work?

I still don’t know the answers. I only know that when we visited Ireland, the storefront of a pub in Kinsale caught my writer’s eye (not to be confused with my regular eyes, which never watch where they’re going, but that’s a different story) and never went away. When I finally gave my pub a name and a home, its setting was a small town in Vermont. The writing of Back to McGuffey’s went quickly enough I never got a chance to go back for a research trip—though there were many, many emails exchanged with Vermonters who could look out their windows and see what I was trying to imagine.

I love inspiration. As a writer without much of an imagination, I depend on it. But I think it would be nice if just once in a while, it came around when I wanted it instead of in its own time.

©2023 Liz Flaherty All Rights Reserved
Retired from the post office and married to Duane for…a really long time, USA Today bestselling author Liz Flaherty has had a heart-shaped adult life, populated with kids and grands and wonderful friends. She admits she can be boring, but hopes her curiosity about everyone and everything around her keeps her from it. She likes traveling and quilting and reading. And she loves writing. http://lizflaherty.net/