[endlesslove230]

When I was little I used to write touching stories and I still wonder where I got the ideas. My school holds a few important competitions of literature and I'd love to take part int them with something really good. I still have six months to prepare, but I wonder, what do you do to get inspired for writing?

[joypulv]

Mostly it isn't what you do, it's mulling over what happens around you, and you find ways to express universal emotions and notions through them. Tragedy, joy, comedy, irony. Truth and beauty.
You see something that others didn't notice, or couldn't put into words until you did.

You may invent from it all. Yeats writes about the little fish he catches and it turns into a girl who runs away, and he spends his life looking for her. Simple words, simple rhyme, it could have been written by a child, but you have to be older to feel the sense of longing and hope.

[Wondergirl]

The rule is, "Write what you know."

I wrote and submitted a story about one of my library volunteers who has Asperger's, and it was accepted into a magazine the next day. I live in the Chicago area and have written about things that happen in a Chicago setting. (If I wrote stories with a Salt Lake City setting, they would be a flop--since I have never lived there and don't know the area.) I've written stories about my beloved cats (never about a dog--ick! Never had one of those) and created a story around a librarian (I was one for 30 years).

A woman in my writers' group wrote a wonderful story about a little girl whose mother was a beautician and had a studio in their basement. The story became very colorful as the little girl told of sights and sounds and smells and what she heard and could touch in her mother's shop. We found out later that the woman writer's mother had a studio in her basement, so the writer knew first-hand all about the descriptions she had put into her story. She wrote what she knew.

What do you know about? Write a story around it.

[Kahani Punjab]

I agree with Wonder Girl.
The golden rule is, "Write what you feel, about what you know."
Freud says, "we write to give vent to our suppressed and pent-up feelings, unfulfilled dreams and all types of emotions, which might have disturbed us at any stage of life."
You can write about anything, which tempts you, which you want to do/see/experience/feel, but can't due to one reason or the other. Consequently, you will find that you are a great author. Just try to express yourself. This way, your gratification will take place, and you will feel more happy, more satisfied and more relaxed. The birth of a story or article will be bonus.

Try and tell...
I wait.