Let’s follow up Nancy’s post about finding ideas with this question: How did you come up with the idea behind your current WIP? What was your moment of inspiration that caused you to begin writing?
Reader Friday: Talking About Inspiration
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I had the urge to write a rebel character, so I came up with my current protagonist, Kelly Cooper. She’s a detective on a case and soon becomes a suspect. She does all kinds of things you’d never expect from a law abiding officer, but hey, her ass is on the line. Cliche? Yeah, but fun. 😀
I read a book about the Irish influence in the Canadian underworld and, having Irish grandfathers, thought it an interesting background for a series. Wasn’t a lot mentioned about Irish women in the book so Mabel started to form in my head. And once she was fully formed, she simply took off.
The women in my family are all Scots-Irish, and I know that woe befalls the fool who messes with ’em. My great grandmother was known to pull her pistol from her hand-muff and wave it around to give directions.
Mine was a gimme. The Beloved Spouse and I were watching Homicide Hunter on ID. Three-quarters of the way through an episode, I turned to her and said, “This has Penns River (my fictional town) written all over it.” She agreed. I’m about halfway through now, using the key plot points, building how they come to pass through my existing characters and setting.
I was running, iPod on shuffle, when a song came on I didn’t know. (Husband programmed gadget for me and his musical taste is expansive and esoteric). I stopped dead in Nikes. It wasn’t the song itself — a banal song about heroin addiction — it was one sentence. I suddenly had a great title. Nothing to do with drugs.
The plot? That came like a torrent after that, though I had been thrashing around with crappy ideas for months.
The muse moves in mysterious ways. Sometimes she’s a jogger.
Probably jogging puts one in a “flow” mindset similar to being in the shower, another great spot for inspiration!
I once wrote a weekly column for a Florida daily. At one point, I did a series of articles examining political rhetoric. I wrote ironically, but the e-mails I got revealed how many of my readers had no sense of irony. It led me to conclude that the most important element in shaping a religious or political nut is the absence of a sense of humor. Something like a missing organ or limb–and I was off and running.
It was another book – “Hunger Games.” I love the dystopian/apocalypse story so much I wanted to write one of my own. I know it’s not too original, but I’m having the best time writing it. And no, there aren’t any kids killing each other in my story… 🙂
It was the setting for me. It is based in my hometown, which has a very colorful history. It is reported that there were 76 deaths prior to a natural death. This was the Old West, in a small Nevada mining town. So, I thought, what a great setting for a murder. i am also a great fan of ghost stories, so it evolved from just a historical mystery to a parallel mystery from present day, protagonist’s childhood, and the Old West. Since this is my first novel, it was getting kind of hard to plot and I realized that for this to be successful, I was going to have to split this into a series or a trilogy. I had too many characters that needed to be in it to tell both stories. (The Old West and the present day solving of a cold case from the MC’s past). The setting came first and then one of the major characters, but not the protagonist. I have been struggling with plotting, but it is finally starting to come together. This has been a long process for me. I hope it will become a little bit easier with subsequent books. 🙂
A dream. I got the characters from the dream, what they were fleeing, and consequently dreamed the story for about a week. I took notes, fiddled with it, and the writing began.
I was planning a book with my husband’s super-powered character, and I asked, “How can I really take him down a peg? How can I DESTROY him?” Because it’s so much fun to destroy characters. So now he’s running from his life from his own fetch–a doppelganger who will kill him with a single touch–and trying to figure out how to kill it before it kills him.
My other WIP, I’d played a game that had magic bees in it. I loved, loved, loved the magic bees and the way they would gather magic and store it in honeycomb. So I borrowed that and mixed it with a vampire romance where the hero isn’t actually a vampire. He just seems like one.
Better late than never, eh? Would have posted yesterday, but it was Spring Cleaning here in Montana.
My WIP–slated for an “end of April” release–is going to slip by at least a month. My publisher-Me-is cool with that. The inspiration, you ask?
Catalina Eddie was inspired by events that I stumbled into as a military policeman serving in Vietnam. At its heart is greed and betrayal. I was pretty much a kid, an idiot, or both at the time. What I found along with the consequences changed my thinking forever. After a high-ranking military officer put out a contract on my life, things took a subtle twist and everything went away, as if by magic.
Inside these events was a story–certainly not the truth or actual events–but a good story just the same. It’s taken me a while to find it and write it, but now it’s close to being done. And outta here! Stay tuned.
35 years ago, while a student in Spain, I was hungry to read something in English, so I picked up a sci-fi novel at the Walgreen’s on the north side of Madrid. There was one character in that book that caught my imagination, which spawned a story that stayed in my head all these years, growing to an epic tale that I told myself, purely for my own amusement. When I finally got the time to give some serious time to writing a novel, I was stumped for a premise until I realized my private yarn could be turned into a series of novels for public consumption. 18 months later, I am nearing the painstaking process of writing the first in the series, planning to self-publish later this year, and also looking for a traditional publisher.