What inspired your idea?

Ack, double post. Whoopsie daisy!

Generally, I'm inspired by everything. Books I've read, songs I've heard, poems that touched me. I'm forever building universes around fashion shows and works of art--the more otherworldly, the better. Sometimes I've inspired by people I meet as well. I met a young woman in one of my classes last semester who captivated me. There's a character homage to her in my novella Unearthly.

The Hotel Kincaid was inspired by my love of urban exploration, abandoned places, arresting architecure, and oddballs out of time.

A Diamond for You came about as a result of my fascination with jewelry-making, gemstones, and gemstone appraisal. Not to mention my fondness for complex people leading complex lives where the choices they make aren't always good.

A Prick, A Pinch is just an excuse for me to flaunt my infatuation with body modification and call it magical fantasy. I'll take any excuse I can get.

Tentatively-titled The Guardian Seeker is Law & Order: SVU meets Touched by Angel meets The L Word.

Like I said, I'm inspired by everything I see.

For me, it comes from all over the place: the seasons, dreams, music, movies, video games and of course - other books. I find just because I'm inspired, doesn't mean I'll actually come up with anything, but it's a good feeling anyway.

Various elements float around in my mind until some of them stick together.

On the rare occasions I feel a strong emotion, there's often an accompanying mental image. I'll try and hold onto that and accumulate a story around it that (I hope) might evoke that emotion.

One of my favorites of my stories came about because I promised to write someone a birthday story, and I went for a walk and saw a Chihuahua.

I always find my inspiration a hard one to source solidly. Usually there's a moment where an idea is planted; sometimes this happens as I'm going about my day or other times I'll be drifting off to sleep and ruminating. I've had ideas from dreams quite a lot, which sounds odd, but I have cinematic dreams that usually have quite complex atmosphere and plot so I pilfer inspiration from those.
I find writing exercises can be amazing stimuli too.

My current WIP is an assessed project so I was ruminating over it for a while. The idea came from speaking to a relative about cultural myths and her telling me a story from her childhood that sparked something.

It went something like this:

I’d been a slave to the keyboard and typing chair for six months, having not been out of the house. So I jumped at the chance when my niece, Jamie, ask me to come along for a ride. Driving down a back road with Jamie and her daughter, Fia, on a balmy summer day, we were discussing how low our gas was and if we could make to a town called Fort Payne. Fia was acting up in the back seat, broadcasting 180 decibels from the hole in her face. Jamie reared her head and said, "Shut the hell up, please. Or we'll pawn your azz for gas money at the next pullout, I swear!”


Fia tried, "But I was just--"


"Shaddap!"

I thought about that outburst for a minute. My ears were still ringing. Then it hit me... What if, I mused, that in a distressed (dystopian) society, heads of households were allowed to pawn dependents to a company called Family Trade & Loan for huge cash advances? And what if that dependent was a teenage girl who ended up with a six-month sentence at the Tranquility Harbor Moon base on Luna, assigned to a rough and tumble mining company filled with slobaholic miners?

Wait. What about a Burlesque in Space? 'Cause maybe she's forced to work as an exotic dancer and given an "Attractapeal" rating for her physical attributes. Oh, gawd, yeah. And let’s give her a tin number tag and a jumpsuit that identifies her as a Sunshine Class (12 to 18 year-old) wards.

All this brainstorming materialized in about 20 minutes and all I could hear was white noise in my head--I'd tuned everything else out.

Phuck...

I couldn't get home fast enough to start pounding plastic and scribbling notes. I'd heard plenty about the sex slave market but this would be a sanitized, legal work program sanctioned by the government. What kind of abuses could such a powerful entity inflict upon its slave labor wards? Unlimited, I decided. Because most of the cash advances levied out were screened to force the payment of huge delinquent back-tax settlements.

Out of sight, out of mind, wards wouldn't stand a chance in hell. Let the personal rights and freedoms be abused and trampled.


I think the lesson here is that lightning can strike at the most uneventful and unexpected times. Rides, walks, runs and vacations--they're all ripe for the muse to appear and start the creative dance. Get out and change your scenery. It's good for what ails you if you're blocked. It sure busted me out of a creative freeze.

I was listening to my Dad tell a story about how they were running down a mountain and the transmission fell out of whatever car they'd stolen and they careened off into the the brush and emerged unscathed, screaming profanity laced diatribes about how it was the other's fault.

And I thought. "I'm so tired of writing this boring shit (my then current YA, which turned out was absolutely well written boring shit). I want to write something that feels like listening to these stories." But two girls instead of my dumbass cousins.

While turning over that idea, I ended up thinking about partying in college and this one girl. Me and her were the best together-- we worked together in a very straight laced conservative environment and we were killing ourselves trying to hide our redneck ways. We started partying together and, I mean we were the worst ever, but we had so much fun even when we were like "oh shit" the next day. It was a hell of a good time until it was just tragic. That sobering effect of tragedy just never left me.

Finally, I wanted to write a hot guy with a motorcycle. All my life, I've been surrounded by bike guys. MC's that were hard riding and hard living but not at all the 1%-er TV MC's. My husband is a uniformed motor (Harley) cop-- and he went to McDonald's late one night in a bad section of DC, in uniform. Walked in and the only people in there were three hard-ass, stone-cold MC guys from Detroit. He asked them about their bikes and they went completely fan-girl on him. They asked to have their picture taken with him! He usually never says yes when tourists ask for pictures, but this time he did.

So that all got patched together in my head.

I was puzzling over my lack of inspiration when I started out. I had no clue what I wanted to write about. Nothing was grabbing me by the lapels and screaming in my face. The more I thought about it, the deeper the pit of nothingness widened. Despairing, yes. I was driving a delivery/service route one day and thinking about what I saw on the news that morning, the bomber Eric Rudolph was caught the previous night in a small town in NC, not far from where I was driving, in fact. I got to wondering how he survived in the woods. Then I started thinking of that young police officer, not long on the job, making the arrest.

Not long after, I started envisioning a truly bad guy, lurking in the hills, but he's no bomber. He's targeting lone women. And a youngish officer investigating a bad smell in an old barn and discovering a pile of bodies.... BAM! I had a story right there. I couldn't wait to get to my motel room. I stopped and got a pad of paper and started writing that evening. It never came out quite the way I imagined it, but the core of the story remained.

I've had three or four others pop into my head like that since, and wrote the ideas down until I was ready to begin writing. It's a never-ending process. My thing is, I have to see it in my my mind first. An actual picture, like a movie. If I can't see it, there's no way I could ever describe it.

Dances With Words said:

I was puzzling over my lack of inspiration when I started out. I had no clue what I wanted to write about. Nothing was grabbing me by the lapels and screaming in my face. The more I thought about it, the deeper the pit of nothingness widened. Despairing, yes. I was driving a delivery/service route one day and thinking about what I saw on the news that morning, the bomber Eric Rudolph was caught the previous night in a small town in NC, not far from where I was driving, in fact. I got to wondering how he survived in the woods. Then I started thinking of that young police officer, not long on the job, making the arrest.

Not long after, I started envisioning a truly bad guy, lurking in the hills, but he's no bomber. He's targeting lone women. And a youngish officer investigating a bad smell in an old barn and discovering a pile of bodies.... BAM! I had a story right there. I couldn't wait to get to my motel room. I stopped and got a pad of paper and started writing that evening. It never came out quite the way I imagined it, but the core of the story remained.

I've had three or four others pop into my head like that since, and wrote the ideas down until I was ready to begin writing. It's a never-ending process. My thing is, I have to see it in my my mind first. An actual picture, like a movie. If I can't see it, there's no way I could ever describe it.

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far more often than not, I don't need an idea, and don't need anything to write about. I sit down, drop what I hope is an interesting character into what I hope is an equally interesting situation, and just tell the story of how he deals with the situation.

For me, at least, it's a pretty much infallible method of telling a story without need inspiration, ideas, or anything else.

My inspirations are several of the things I love. Martial arts, superpowers, magic, adventure, fantasy creatures. I decided to combine these things into my writing to have a story that encompassed all of this. The key for me was not to combine too much that nothing was touched on enough. I also love the idea of people learning how to be heroes or warriors.

I got pi-... annoyed because everything I read had parts I didn't like, so I decided I'd gather everything I love and cherish, put it together and write my own novel. Just like that.

My inspiration sort of comes from everywhere.

I can trace the roots of my current WIP back to around the time I was...maybe fourteen or fifteen, and I had a bit of an obsession with architecture and houses. I still do. Houses kind of speak to me, I don't know, like I can see empty spaces and imagine the people who would use them, and how and for what purposes. I used to love doll houses as a kid, or pictures of houses and their layouts, because they were like blank canvasses that I could paint stories onto. And then I got onto the idea that houses can represent love, and security, and comfort, and four walls quite literally sheltering you from the world.

So yeah, the spaces that people occupy, and how they move through those spaces, and how they feel about them, and how those spaces shape us, and get shaped by us, and bear witness to our lives.

And so that was the backbone of it. And then I spent a long summer home for the first time in a few years, and fell back in love with my city, and fell in love with a girl I couldn't have on the banks of a bayou in New Orleans, and it was just a moment in time that I wanted to capture somehow.

And that's generally how my inspiration works: I don't get story ideas, I get feelings and moments that I want to put into words, kind of like Rebekkamaria said:

Rebekkamaria said:

This is a lovely topic (probably has been talked about before, though). My inspiration comes from details. I love things that go unnoticed, and that's something I want to show: things that matter, small things, safe spaces between people, fears that are left unsaid. I just love those quiet moments that become so meaningful you're left speechless. So yeah, there comes my inspiration.

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And it might be as simple as the feeling of sticky-warm summer nights and puppy love and glittery lights on the water, and the way time has no meaning when you're nineteen and you don't believe in the future. I like to find those moments and build stories around them. Instead of deciding to build a house and then going to find materials, I'll find a single brick and be inspired to say "I'm going to build a house with this."

My current, nearly finished unpublishable WIP was inspired by a couple of secondary characters in a book by a famous writer, characters who were simply dropped from the story when they no longer mattered to the major characters. They had long fascinated me, so I decided to fashion a story for them, subsequent to their passage from the other story.

caw

Lost and Doctor Who hooked up and had my baby.

I get my inspiration from everywhere, but the strongest place are my dreams. All my novel and short story ideas started either in dreams or were influenced by them. I love strong scenes with strong imagery you don't forget. I love dreamy writing that speeds and slows with emotions.

Like most of the other posters, I get my ideas from pictures, music, things people say, or happenings in the world and let my slightly warped imagination take over.

With Twisted, I saw a picture of Jenna Talackova, the transgendered woman who was in the Ms. Universe contest. Totally gorgeous. I had no idea that she was a trans-woman until I read more about her. I wondered how a guy would feel if his consciousness was suddenly placed in a woman's body.

This was not a new concept by any means as gender switching goes way back, and no, the novel is NOT about a transgendered person, but nevertheless she became my model for the novel. In fact, the picture on the front cover resembles her somewhat and I used elements of her in another novel I'm trying to sell, Picture (im)perfect.

Lindsay Versus the Marauders (and the other two books in the trilogy) was inspired by the movie, Paul. Don't ask.

The Tower and Death Bytes were both inspired by my ideas about death and resurrection, but not religious by any means. The Tower deals with superheroes and Death Bytes is like The Matrix meets Speed.

I'd actually dreamed up Catnip on my own and gotten about halfway through before I saw an article on the Internet that was a young British boy who invented a machine which identified the gene that causes redheadedness (his brother is a redhead). I let my imagination take over.

Currently, working on something with magic, and have finished (and sold) an adult-oriented novel about a coroner, her girlfriend, the Mafia, and a very nasty alien. Just off the top of my head on this one...but it works.

Long post, but the point of all this is to take inspiration not only from your own gray matter but also from real life and twist it to fit your vision.

Ah, I guess I could get more specific.

I was inspired by the nearly-200-year-old house I grew up in and its history. I wouldn't be the person I am, writing about the things I write about if it weren't for that.

I am inspired by the city I live in, Washington D.C. It's filled with museums, galleries, and, yes, history in all the least likely places. And there are so many things to visit nearby: the Shenandoah Valley, battlefields, mountains, the Bay . . .

Then there are those moments of inspiration. Usually they come to me when I'm doing something like washing my hands and I think to myself, "The prostitute did it!" And everything else falls into place.

There's a place in one of my WIPs where the MC has just had a disturbing dream. Almost verbatim, that was a dream I'd had once.

I heard a story (now I can't remember where) of a civilian woman who nursed a wounded soldier out in a field for several days because she feared he was too wounded to move. He survived. I think that'll become part of my next WIP.

Fanny Kemble's attempt to escape from Butler Plantation by rowing away across the river inspired my character's own flight by rowboat.

Actress Sarah Cushman's early career served as something of a model for my own actress character's life.

So, I pull a little form here and a little from there, using real-life events as a starting point.

… I don't even know.

I started a very, very rough form of my WIP back when I was 12 years old. As far as I remember, one day I just sat down in the corner of my room with a pen and notebook, and outlined the whole plot. I also listened to Enya's "Lothlorien" non-stop for the whole time…

In the beginning, I got a lot of my setting from Tolkien - elves, orcs, magical artifacts, a prophecy… Yeah, none of those made it into the current WIP The most original worldbuilding aspect came from a dream I had, about people living in underwater cities and having their personal dolphin-companion (think Philip Pullman's daemons). The idea changed a lot over time and doesn't involve underwater cities or pet dolphins anymore, but that's where I got it from.

Needless to say, the current manuscript is extremely different from what I wrote when I was 12. The new setting is inspired by the societies of Minoan Greece, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. I felt like too many fantasy novels were medieval-inspired and wanted to go for a change of scenery. A couple of plot points are also a nod to ancient history, like a siege that ends in a similar way to Tuthmosis III's Battle of Megiddo, or a civilisation that was destroyed when their volcanic island erupted (as with the Thera eruption).

But when it comes to plot, I have no idea where I get my ideas from. They just… pop up in my brain. I might be walking home one day and suddenly realise that the MC's brother has to die, or that it's all a conspiracy. I'd say 90% of my plot comes from moments like that. The other 10% comes from ancient history.

Hah, I recently did a blog post with a similar theme. Often there are too many inspirations.

Like others on the thread, for me it's almost always a moment. One "something" I can always remember. The moment in 7th grade that inspired my first short story is still vivid. But it's never a full-fledged story idea. No plot, maybe a character. Just a moment. sometimes I can build a story around it, sometimes I can't. My completed novel was inspired the moment I stepped on the grounds of Pompeii and knew I wanted to feel what the people experienced that day.

I don't get inspired.

Usually when I am alone or driving a conversation pops into my head, then a title. Sometimes the title first. It will drive me crazy for a while, as in - what the heck does that MEAN?

If I leave it alone, though, the people start talking and the story begins.

All sorts of places. My first published short story was from a half-dream I had just before waking up one morning. Another story, not yet published and probably not likely to ever be, is about a diet that becomes a religion and was sparked when I saw The Sonoma Diet for sale in the grocery store. Many times, a story is inspired.by a "I wonder what would.happen if..." moment.

Some have been from songs. I have a fairy tale inspired by the first verse of "Feed the Tree" by Belly, and my WIP novel was first inspired by "Lofticries" by Purity Ring. To me, the lyrics sounded like soldiers in World War I hunkering down in the trenches during a fierce battle. One thing led to another and now there's tanks and sci-fi stuff happening.

I was a police Officer in the UK for eight long years. It was around 2009 that I was involved in the Underground bombings and I think that it was only my love of Science Fiction and Fantasy that really got me through the trauma of that event. Consoling families, seeing things no Officer, let alone human should see, dealing with all the garbage involved with the lowest dross the Human race can throw at you. It wears you down. I immersed myself in books, speed reading my way through the novels as if they were doughnuts If I'd had the time back then, I think I would have been writing, but since I've left, I thought to myself, why not? Fantasy kept me going, it was my bread and butter, and now I feel like it's time to contribute and give something back.

Maybe some people have a natural antenna for picking up narrative signals. I think everyone does, but some people get a thrill from it. You do have to have a way to explore your ideas and make them real. I think ideas are much like dreams: they can so easily disappear if not tended to. But this nurturing of an idea is a form of controlled madness. I think it can take real courage to embrace this kind of madness ... not to mention the much more difficult work of doing something with it.

For me, although ideas can come at unexpected moments like walking in the forest or driving to work, they most often occur when I simply hunt them down. As much as I like the idea that I can't rush my Muse and her gift of an idea, I've learned that she's just as happy for me to pester her for these new ideas. In fact, I think she prefers it that way.

I also think that one idea can be an investment for another idea. Sure, sometimes there's nothing to put into my piggy bank of ideas, but that's rare. Like so many things in life, finding and/or generating ideas comes through practice.