Goodreads asked Deb Elliott:

How do you get inspired to write?

Deb Elliott From reading or listening to others' work. When I feel particularly empty creatively, I go to poetry meetups. One night after one, I walked home and wrote three poems.

I belong to a small group of writers who get together and spend an afternoon or evening writing to prompts; I also beta-read and edit for them. Their ideas spur my own. I also belong to the East Saint Paul Speculative Fiction Meetup group; reading and critiquing others' works starts ideas spinning in my head that I wouldn't normally have. Like, I'm not much of a scifi writer, but our group is having a flash fic night next week, and one of my friends challenged me to come up with a 500-word story. The idea for mine came the next day.

I also read poetry when the creative well runs dry -- Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, the Romantic poets, Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath. Afterward, the words just seem to spill out of me. But then, I majored in English literature in college, and I have a deep appreciation of these writers of the classics.

I get my best story ideas in the morning between when I first wake, then roll over and go back to sleep and then wake up again. I also have very vivid dreams that are story fodder. Keeping a pad of paper and a pen next to the bed is important for me because if I don't write the ideas down right away, I forget them.

I also do a lot of thinking about my writing when I'm driving -- long commutes to work or when I'm traveling to see my family who all live about 4 hours away.

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