The more you write, the more you may find yourself drawn to certain topics. Maybe you’ll especially like writing about your family or your pets. Maybe you’ll have the most to say about your friends or relatives. Maybe you’ll write about bugs or planets or baseball or maybe about baseball-playing bugs on other planets.
That’s another reason to carry a notebook. Whenever you think of something new about your favorite subject—your dog, for example—write it down immediately. You probably won’t use all the ideas you jot down in a single poem, but sooner or later you’re likely to use some of them in one poem and some of them in another poem. You can never make too many notes. Many of my pig poems would never have happened if I’d stopped writing down ideas about pigs after I’d written my first pig poem. I still occasionally jot down something new about pigs.