Where do you get your inspiration?

[techmanjoy]

I have been thinking for quite a while about writing a story but I am always unable to pick a topic and stick with it.

 

So I was just wondering with so many wonderful authors here how do you all choose your topic? How do you find the inspiration to start a new story?

[D'Artagnon]

Oftener than not, it finds you.

 

Okay, so that's kinda a cliche answer, but I will try to elaborate.

 

A lot of writers take inspiration from other writers.  And not just literary writers, to be sure.  I have been known to make up whole playlists, burn CD's and even just veg out to a single album for hours on end and let the words and music drift through that crusty, salt-covered, briney, desolate thing I call a brain.  I know another very good writer in the gay-teen genre who wrote three enormous, Steven King sized novels about events inspired by both his own younger experiences and the music of Styx (if you dont' know what I'm talking about, the writer is Smokr and his opus is called The Circle, Circle Squared and Circle Cubed).  I myself have a fondness for Pink Floyd and other classic rock musicians and lyrisists, as well as old school sci-fi writers like Edgar Rice Burrows and my personal favorite Robert A. Heinlein.

 

I'm sure a lot of us take inspiration from cinema.  I know Star Wars (and yes, i like the prequel stuff too) really jump started me.  I've been a comic book fan since middle school, and loved the X-Men waaaaay back before it was trendy and cool.  I have been into table top, pencil and dice role playing games since about middle school as well, but I think i've always been one of those attention starved cut ups that drops into accents at will and remembers movie quotes the way other kids my age memorized baseball stats.  So in a way, I guess I've been sort of an actor and comic repeater for a lot of my life.  All of these things do rub off on a person (no sexual pun intended) and in many ways show up in my work.

 

Examples - I used to teach fencing at the local YMCA where I used to live.  That experience led to me start a series called Coupe (pronounced Koo-pay).  Coupe is a fencing term that literally means "cut over" refereing to a slicing attack.  In that story there are references to Jedi and lightsabers, creatures from ancient myth made real, dragons, courtly intreague, many musical insertions (mostly for mood, just stuff I was listening to at the time of writhing), and several historical references to add flavor to the characters.

 

In another story, I combined elements of several cultural standards to the story, giving it a commonality with our real world.  That story, called Educating Max had elements from popular children's literature, physics, use of thought projection, a bit of Disney inspired character development, a brief interlude into the world of Elf Quest (Wendy Pini's masterwork of art and story, do check it out!), an X-Men reference and a brief nod to sports.  And while the story focuses on none of these influences directly, they all play a part in coloring how the main characters deal with the situations they're put into.

 

One of the best teachers I ever had told me that the best writing consists of two very strong and undeniable truths.  The first is to write about what you know and love.  Your greatest inspirations are the things you already know in your life put to the forge of your imagination.  The other truth is that it is never completely easy.  Oh, sure, ideas and little inspirations can come to you rather quickly, but it's the binding of these things into a story that not only feels right to you, but that other can relate to that takes time, patience and quite literally, many attempts.  Eventually, you may find a style that suits you, or a formula that can jump start you into a story.  And that's a good thing.  But if should always take thought and emotion and sometimes having people downplay what you write before you get it right in your own way, and that, brothers, is never easy.  Like anything in life, if it's worth doing, it's worth the effort to do it.

 

Hope that helped or at least didn't scare you off from making the attempt.  Telling a good story is the heart of any writing.  Not every story finds the right audience at first.  Not every idea gets worked into something you as the writer feel comfortable with either.  It's a process,  A journey, and one that will likely take a few spills along the way.  But if you've got that fire in your belly to say something, even if it's been said a hundred thousand million billion different ways, do seek to get your story out there.  Who knows, your way might be the way that reaches someone at the right moment, gives them a smile or changes their perspective on something they're going through.  In the end, your inspiration and the many many combinations it inspires could literally change someone's life for the better.  Human connections: the ultimate goal of any literature is to communicate to each other part of that experience we call life, no matter how far fetched, unbelievable or silly that message might be.

[techmanjoy]

Thank you for your valuable insights D' Artagnon!

 

In speaking about your own expreince and that of Smokr it seems like you choose to have a couple of degrees of seperation between what you literally know and what you write. Is that often an intellectual choice to make things easier to write creatively or is it just something that happens through the writing process viscerally for you?

 

Thinking about my expreinces and what I might like to write I would think it would be easier with that seperation so that you aren't writing a history . That or getting so in depth that you might loose your readers in unneceary context and fluff which you might write with only one degree of seperation from the topic if you weren't being especially vigelent in avoiding.

 

Slighlty off topic, in writing the previous extremely runon sentence which I managed to break into two finally. I noticed I was falling prey to the word 'that' which has been brought up in another topic in this section. I find it extremely illuminating and I will have to post something there about it was well.

[D'Artagnon]

Well, two point there.  First, I like to have someone read my stuff before I post it.  You don't always get an objective response, but it helps.  The other thing I tend to do is I'll actually read it out loud.  If it isn't something that you would be comfortable speaking, then it's probably not written well either.  That could just be a stylistic thing, I tend to write how I speak.

 

The thing about writing what you know is that you don't have to rely on second hand info for it most of the time.  The experience you have is genuine and you can write about it with more energy and depth.  Making that experience relatable to others is the writer's challenge.

 

When I think about great pieces of literature, there are some times when experience comes across as necessary, and some when you can tell that the author researched only, but didn't live some things.  I think about Andre Dumas being a soldier in Europe giving him the experience he needed to write "The Three Musketters" and "The Count of Monte Christo," yet how Robert A. Heinlein never had access to personal computers or spacecraft yet wrote about both with such clairity and forethought (he predicted the internet, after all).  Would Hemingway have the same impact in his writing if he didn't run with the bulls?  I guess it's a matter of choosing how you develop your story based on your experience and those things you can research.

[Wolfhighlander]

I get my inspiration from so many places.  Sometimes it could be something I read that leads me to a story.  It could be a song, a movie, or something like that.  For instance for my story They Weren't Alone was because I saw the movie; The Boy in Striped Pajamas. I wrote it in about 6 hours.  I've recently written something that was inspired by a Russian language WW2 movie.  So that is how i get a lot of my inspiration.

[ken barber]

My inspirations come from some of the most mundane things and at the oddest times. I am currently working on a segment of a new story where my inspiration is coming from a hand carved statue of The Haitian Goddess Gran Lbo, goddess of wisdom. Its a beautifully carved bust that I purchased from and old man after watching him carve the piece over a couple of days. This was in the mid 90's and ever since the statue as been in a prominent place in my home. Recently I was working on a character and trying to portray his patience in a very turbulent time. I was struggling when I looked up and saw the eyes of Gran Lbo staring at me. Her deep seated desire to proceed carefully is carrying over into the character. 

[Kyle Aarons]

Much of the ideas I have from my stories come from a passion for ancient history. this is tempered and twisted by life experiences including time spent on the street as a runaway and some of the wishes I had as a kid.

 

Other things used to create my stories is the desire to explore the human condition. As I have mentioned in other treads, Defenders is my attempt to look at Racism in a different light. Also to look at Religion as a force of great good or incredible evil.

 

Part of what I write about is me trying to figure out why people do what they do. What makes two kids from the same family with the same mom and dad turn out so differently? Why does humanity seem to want as a whole to have a king type figure? Why do leaders lead and why are so few really good people? Those are things I want to answer for myslef so I like to explore deeper issue in my stories and sometimes the best way to do so is to figure out a way to pout the characters in a situation best suited for me to do so, and that is the real challenge for me is to figure out that setting.

[ken barber]

Kyle,

Curious it seems you explore the Dark side of humanity more in your stories and I explore the the lighter side of humanity. Following the example of wanting to understand humanity my first thought is what makes two people two completely different views of humanity. 

[Kyle Aarons]

Ken,

 

I really think it is a matter of perspective.

 

Somehow I get the feeling you think people are basically good

 

I have the opinion that people are not basically good

 

therefore we have a different starting point at a fundamental level.

[ken barber]

Very true, I do think that people are basically good and learn to be not good.  I try to see the good in all and almost everyone I have met in my life has some good in them. But my question still is how does two people end up with completely different perspectives on such a basic fundamental. Its intriguing, I would hazard a guess that we have more in common than we think as well. 

[Kyle Aarons]

Ken,

We probably do.

 

However, for me all I have to do is look at how children, young children behave toward others. if an adult does not step in kids will take what they can push smaller weaker ones down, tease the dumber ones... the list goes on and on. Let's be honest, kids are by there very nature mean and self centered and it is far easier to reinforce that than it is to make them be nice to each other. If this was not the case we would have mass Muslim uprisings against those doing the horrors we see daily in the Middle East. No one would have moved on to "more important things" a week or so after all those girls were abducted by Boco Haram, Ferguson MO would not be getting ready to explode with all sorts of outside groups sending in agitators if the Grand Jury decision doesn't go "Their Way", and we wouldn't have gays slamming straights and straights slamming gays. There wouldn't be gay people going to bakers trying to force them to bake a wedding cake when they know the person is not comfortable with doing so and we wouldn't have straights assaulting gays when they think they can get away with it.

 

and that is just scratching the surface of humanity

[ken barber]

What about the family that work in a soup kitchen for the holiday. What about Organizations Like St jude, what about the High School senior who for his senior project develops a program for at risk youth and 15 years later program works with well over 2500 kids a year. This may not be  the forum to discuss this but I try to see the good things in life because trust me they are there and they are prominent. The one fault I will agree humanity has is they seem to focus on the negative and forget the positive.

[Kyle Aarons]

There is lots of good people do, but the human condition is not by default to be good. If it was the mass evils of the world would be crushed quickly and with very few exceptions the evil is not crushed. It burns itself out then changes from and comes back looking for new victims while the vast majority of the world does nothing.

[ken barber]

This is where we differ Kyle. Evil and Good are not as Black and White as we think. I will say this I have seen a lot of horrors in the world more than most people can even fathom but I have seen a hell of a lot more good in the world. So I respect your perception but I think I will keep my positive outlook and energy because to me that is how you combat "Evil". 

[Kyle Aarons]

my solution is more straight forward, you remove the evil like it is a cancer, cut it out and burn it. When it is done right you scatter the evil and turn it on itself. The best example is Hitler's Germany

[A.B]

Other stories, movies, series, video games, real life, all of the above, parts from all of the above and then forming a new idea from those parts, conversations, memories, there is no end to from where one can draw forth inspiration.

[larkin]

Masturbation

[Parker]

When I'm stuck for an idea I go to Google and search for something like 'fantasy boy art' or "magicians' or something. Then I choose to view images. That brings up tons of pictures, illustrations, cartoons and stuff, and I smoke a joint and scroll through them, waiting for one that speaks to me. Then I imagine that this is an illustration for a story, and I try and imagine the story that it's from. I scribble down the ideas, copy the pic to a folder and look at it all again the next day.; If I find any gems I try to polish them.