Skip to main content

Inspiration! (When your brain goes 'click')



Sorry, I was sick last week. So this week will have to be twice as good!

How do writers get inspired to come up with a great story? To put it another way: who comes up with this stuff? What is inspiration? According to Merriam-Webster:

When inspire first came into use in the 14th century it had a meaning it still carries in English today: “to influence, move, or guide by divine or supernatural influence or action.”

Inspire came from a Latin root which meant literally to “breathe into” So one can imagine divine or magical influence being breathed into an artist or writer, and then it could all come flowing out. Sounds easy. Just find a supernatural being and get him/her/it to breathe the inspiration into you and you are good to go.

But just for the sake of argument, what if you can’t find a supernatural being that is willing to breathe something into you? Well, you could take a page from George R.R. Martin. I cannot say where he came up with all of his ideas for A Song of Ice and Fire (that’s Game of Thrones to those of you who only know it by the television show), but I do know that the political intrigue and inter-kingdom conflict came right out of the pages of medieval history. Then there is the concept that all of these factions are busy fighting each other and trying to consolidate wealth and power rather than preparing themselves for the global climate disaster that is headed for them. Gee, I wonder where he got the idea for that.

You have to grab inspiration wherever you can find it. Inspiration is something (it could even be something quite mundane) that makes your brain go ‘click’.  In an earlier post I talked about the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, see said blog for a more detailed explanation of what this is), which I have participated in six times. Sometimes I have begun NaNoWriMo without the first clue what I was going to write about. In those cases I started out with just a sort of stream of consciousness writing until some semblance of a plot started to take shape. I was able to finish those, but they were not always my best writing. One time I had a title going in and the title was my inspiration. It turned out that was all I needed. The title made my brain go click.

When I wrote The Down Side of Eternity (which has not yet been published but hopefully will be soon) it was based on a concept that had been tumbling around my brain for about 20 years. I made one or two feeble attempts at turning my concept into t short story, but they went nowhere. I had a concept, that’s all, not a plot, no characters, no direction to spin it. When I decided to take that concept and apply it to a NaNoWriMo novel, everything changed. Suddenly I could not get stalled by self-doubt, I had 50,000 words to write! As I was forced to plunge ahead, the concept gradually became a plot. So in this case the concept by itself was not the inspiration. I had had it for twenty years and done nothing with it. It needed a deadline. The deadline itself was not the inspiration but it acted like a catalyst (concept + deadline = a good first draft of a novel).

That is how it worked for me in this one instance. That might not work the next time; inspiration is a tricky thing. You never know when it is going to strike or what it will look like.

(My novel Starliner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, or Amazon.com. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out in October).



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Child of the . . .

  What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school.   It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bureaucrats

  I am one of those nameless, faceless bureaucrats. Yes, that is my job. Though I actually have a name; I even am rumored to have a face. Bureau is the French word for desk, so you could say bureaucrats are “desk people.” In short, I work for the government. I sometimes have to deliver unpleasant news to a taxpayer. I sometimes have to tell them that the deed they recorded won’t work and they will have to record another one with corrections. Or we can’t process their deed until they pay their taxes. I can understand why some of these things upset people. The thing is, we don’t decide these things. It is not the bureaucrats that make the laws. The legislature writes the laws. We are required to follow the law.   If you are going to get mad at someone, get mad at the legislature. Or maybe get mad at the voters who voted the legislature in (That’s you, by the way). The same thing happens when the voters vote in a new district, or vote for a bond, or a new operating levy for an ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Telephonicus domesticus

Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone from 1877 bears about as much similarity to the modern smart phone as an abacus bears to a PC or Mac. There are just about as many leaps in technology in both cases. It’s funny how a major jump in technology happens (like the actual invention of the phone). Then there are some refinements over a few years or decades until it gets to a useful stable form. Then it stays virtually the same for many years with only minor innovations. The telephone was virtually unchanged from sometime before I was born until I was about forty. Push-buttons were replacing the rotary dial, but that was about it. (Isn’t it interesting though that when we call someone, we still call it “dialing?” I have never seen a dial on a cell phone.) Cell phones were introduced and (once they became cheap enough) they changed the way we phone each other. New advancements followed soon after, texting and then smart phones. Personal computers were also becoming commonplace and wer...
Post a Comment
Read more