Goodreads asked Marci Diehl:

How do you get inspired to write?

Marci Diehl Writing is as natural to me as breathing. In fact, I think of it as a kind of alien breath -- if you are from the Writer Planet, it's how you breathe. When you're not writing something -- and I mean, any sort of writing that is communicating something to someone somewhere -- you feel stifled.

I grew up writing. I started writing letters as a second grader, writing to my aunt, who was a nun teaching in the Baltimore/Philadelphia area. I kept that correspondence going for about 50 years, until she died. I wrote long, long letters, sometimes in one of those composition notebooks with the black marbled covers. I wrote over a period of days or weeks, until I finished the letter -- by that time it was more of a journal written to one person.

I wrote plays and columns and short stories and all sorts of things as a teen. I wrote huge missives to my college love that I had to add extra postage to mail. Then, I got married right out of college. And my writing fizzled out for years -- ten, to be exact, as I concentrated on being a Super Wife and mother to 4 sons in 8 years.

So when I say I feel stifled without writing, I know how that feels. But here's the thing -- I never stopped reading. I was and am an avid reader when I'm not writing. I read wonderful books, books I fell in love with, by writers I fell in love with. And there in lies one answer to this question of how I get inspired to write.

Great writing inspires me to want to write. I want to create that magic I feel when I read something wonderful.

I'm inspired every day. Titles come me. Ideas for stories roll around in my head like marbles in an empty drawer as I walk every day. It's sort of a problem -- I see too many things, hear too many pieces of people's stories, and see too many chances to write, all the while trying to get normal things done in a day, like earn a living and nurture real relationships and try to get the carpeting in my downstairs pulled out...

The details of Real Life on this planet may cut into writing time, but they are also great for enriching the stories forming like cloud formations on my Writer Planet.

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