When I was batting around ideas for a workshop one of the exercises I came up with was getting the participants to look at what preoccupies them as a writer - what interests them and inspires them, what themes they keep coming back to. As always I did the exercise myself to see what happened and it turned out to be a really useful and productive thing to do.
Here are mine:
Human relationships place; the intersection between the human world, the natural world and the mystical realm; how events changes us - especially loss and grief; family dynamics; how place affects us and/or shapes us; psychology and counselling; music and lyrics; the past and how we repeat behaviour patterns; cruelty and violence (and the reasons for it); myth and fairytale; parallel universes; a Utopian future; the disintegration of a caring democratic society; repetition and internal rhyme; other worlds; art house film; stories where the ending is ambiguous or left open; other species; where wildness encroaches on order; edges and borders; otherness; the the physical body (and how it ages); being a parent - and how that changes over time; loss and grief; the stories and lies we tell ourselves (and others); memory; collective memory; the way memory changes over time; trauma and how its passed down through families.