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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).



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