However boring or mundane you might think your everyday life, it is teeming with sources of inspiration. It doesn't need to be something that happens directly to you; it might be something you overhear on a train, a thought you have in the shower, the exploits of a coworker or family member, or something you see on TV.

With a little poking and prodding, anything can be turned into a good story ... but only if you're paying attention!

Let's say someone you know is going through a bad separation, and the other party is giving them hell. You're a confidant of theirs, and they're keeping you up to date with all the latest in their ex's nonsense. He's calling her friends, showing up at her workplace, and  always coming up with cruel and unusual ways of making her life difficult.

Of course, this is terrible, and you wouldn't wish it on anyone ... but you've gotta admit, it's interesting. It's the kind of drama that made those vapid Hollywood housewives millionaires. If you've got your writing cap on, then it just might occur to you to incorporate some of what's happening into your manuscript.

Now, this is a friend of yours, and this is their reality, so you're going to want to be delicate about how you approach it. Depending on how true to life your depiction is, you might want to consider asking for their permission to tell their story. However, as is the nature of working from inspiration, the end result needn't look anything like the inspiring event.

In your story, perhaps your friend is a princess with a persistent and conniving suitor. Maybe the genders are reversed, and it's a woman harassing a man. You might start at the beginning of the relationship before everything went bad, only for it to go much, much worse.

If you were to reduce what's happening to your friend down to a kernel of an idea, it could be as simple as 'man bothering woman', and you could build it up from there. It could be as big as the entire premise for your story, or as small as an interaction between two side characters.

The idea here is to look at everything with an appraising eye, and consider how it could be leveraged into a story. Whether you strip it back to its most basic or embellish it beyond your wildest dreams is entirely up to you!