Inspiration is something that really fascinates me. It’s quite the magical and mysterious process, whereby either synapses and brain gunk align just so or the idea fairies flutter down from the magical idea kingdom and knock you over the head with idea wands. You know. Depending on your belief system.
What I find interesting about inspiration is that it’s something that’s mainly outside of our conscious control. It would be pretty nice if you could just make inspiration strike on cue, but then, that wouldn’t be much fun, would it? Also it would be annoying to walk down the street shouting, “EUREKA!” every five seconds.
So where and how did you come up with the idea for your work in progress? How fully-formed did it emerge from the inspiration ether? What do you do when you need inspiration to strike?
JACOB WONDERBAR emerged very roughly formed: all of a sudden I decided I wanted to write a wacky middle grade science fiction novel and then simultaneously thought of one of the planets the kids visit, which I shant share because it’s a spoiler alert. Everything after that emerged from staring at the screen and wringing out ideas.
What about you? How did you come up with your idea?
1. my semi-finished WIP—I had insomnia in the later part of 2008 and the night I was finally falling asleep, the story came to me. needless to say, I did not fall asleep that night.
2. I read a series and thought "I can do better" and came up with a series idea that is waiting for my attention.
3. I held up a box of matches :)…this one will be interesting
4. My current WIP is inspired by my mother's life.
**word verification: KARMARTH*** a relative of karma perhaps???
I read Homer's Odyssey this summer for fun, and enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. In the middle of all those descriptions of the ships and of sailing across the sea, I thought to myself: what if this were set in space? And then, for some reason, I imagined Telemachus as a girl, because that seemed more interesting (and challenging) to me than having him be a boy. I combined it with the world of my then WIP, and a potential love interest popped into mind, and from there, bam! Story.
I find that story inspiration is kind of like smashing a window: once your ideas have reached a critical mass, some catalyst comes in and causes a plot thread (or several plot threads) to suggest itself, moving across the ideas in a line that you couldn't have really seen or controlled beforehand.
I almost always seem to get my ideas when I'm driving to my day job! (funny how that goes…) The commute is pretty long, so it normally gives me plenty time to work the basic idea into something large enough for a short story or novel.
The idea for my current project came from something I caught a glimpse of for half a second on my usual daily drive. The rest of the plot was all there by the time I arrived at work. The characters took a little longer.
There's something about driving that makes it an ideal time for coming up with & working on ideas. You can just sort of 'zone out' of the task in hand, and put your mind to more meaty stuff.
Please do not surmise that I am a careless driver.
Interesting read through the comments!
This is one of those questions writers get asked the most, and the least satisfying one (for the asker) to have answered. I think they expect: "I sit in a darkened room with candles, work myself into a fevered pitch, wrestle with my demons… and then… IDEA!"
As for me, the current WIP came to me nearly fully formed in a dream after postulating an unfinished "what if?" in my journal before bed.
make of that what you will.
The inspiration for my WIP came to me while I was in Rome. Our local guide had taken us to the Roman Forum and mentioned something that had taken place at the time of the Roman Republic. I’ve read a lot of books about the Empire—a period that I am not interested in, and I have no desire to compete with THE ROBE or GLADIATOR. I saw a niche that had never been filled, and I have filled it.
Thanks for asking, Nathan.
Barbara Bockman
My mother got pregnant, married and divorced in the space of a year in the 1940s. She was embarrassed of it and didn't talk about it, even up to her death 10 years ago. I've wanted to write her storyfor a long time, but everyone who could fill in the details is dead. So for five years I've been pondering how to write her story. And then it hit me: make it up.
My inspiration came from two songs (1. "I Killed Poor Sally's Lover" The Avett Brothers 2. "Long Black Veil" The Proclaimers) It was a very rough idea at first. The music I've listened to along the way has inspired most of the pivotal scenes. I'm currently finishing up the 1st draft.
Well, there's already over 300 of these so I doubt you've time to read them all, but I'll give'er a go.
I was inspired by the idea of knowing the future and having the choice to make changes, only to discover that in the end, you made things worse. This, of course, led to the fantasy series I'd like to finish.
I was doing homework. No joke. It was on a piece of paper I had set aside for math scrap paper, and it was written in red pen. What I wrote that day, without knowing WHO the narrator was, turned out to be the introduction – and frame work – of my entire novel. My other WIP – the sequel to that idea – was written for NaNoWriMo because my narrator woke me up in the middle of the night and said "HEY! SEQUEL IDEA!" or something like that.
Needless to say, this stuff hits me from my subconscious. I'm sure it's the little weird things I think everyday, complied somehow.
WIP 1: I originally started with a scene in my mind and worked through what happened. Eventually, I came up with an extra character for the story I liked so much, I created a story around her I liked much better and have been working on since then.
WIP 2: I again imagined a scene and created a story around it. I guess it's what I usually do.
On a two-hour car trip, ideas started flowing. When I got home I wrote seventeen pages, which eventually were expanded and polished into a 339-page novel.
Along the way I visited some of the real locations I wrote about to tidy up descriptions, and did a Google search for my character names – good idea, as my original name for the name character was a real person in the same city with the same sort of job!
As always! I started with a simple idea–what if someone took part in a "noble" project, was warned by an acquaintance it wasn't on the up-and-up, and their continued involvement created dire consequences? Then decided a general on my two main characters and jumped straight into a conflict scene with them. (I've found my characters detail themselves that way.) After that, I shot back to the beginning of the story and began TRULY writing. (I always know that first written scene will never hang around, it simply graphs my characters.) From there out, I simply set down and hammer out what my characters are doing in my head–and sometimes it seems like utter nonsense, but the stories ALWAYS wrap their way around and, in the end, it all makes sense! My characters always spin my story a way I never dreamt of, but I think that makes it better!
I at least hope it does, because now that it's complete/polished, I have begun the query process! (YIKES!! That's more stressful than voices bantering back and forth in my head–even when I think, "That doesn't make sense!", to something one of them has said, and it RESPONDS, "Just shut up and write it! You're working on a word processor, if it doesn't make a ring in the end, you can take it out!")
I am delving in writing about my fantasy world of Vampires and how I became inspired is not by the enddless movies/T.V shows but simply I want to write my own preferred ending I wnat to show so much struggles between my characters that when they do get together it makes complete sense and a relief to my readers. I really don't like when an author makes it by selling loads of their books and then the following books in the series is a huge disappointment.
Wow, there are a lot of posts here, but none the same as mine. My current novel began with the dream I had for my own life when I was ten years old. It was a big dream and I knew there would be a lot of obstacles, but living on an island in Alaska, I had time to daydream and work out all the details. I never had the opportunity to fulfill that dream, but I liked to write and my dad gave me Arthur C. Clark's "Rama" when I was thirteen. I devoured sci-fi (the real stuff, not the horror/fantasy stuff). At fifteen I wrote my first sci-fi novel. At nineteen I got married and at 21 began a decade of childbearing in which my short-term memory took a hiatus and I wrote only in bits and pieces. But the dreams I had as a child still visited me often and when I reread that first novel I knew the concept was good. So I made a up a character who could be what I had wanted to be. Thus began my WIP, enriched and more informed by two additional decades of daydreaming. It feels oddly autobiographical to me even though it's totally outside my life and set in the future.
Does anybody else feel like they're telling too much about themselves when they write?
My current WIP came to me while cooking chicken for dinner. I thought, "What if this chicken could talk? What would he say to me?" BAM! 50,000 words and counting!