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8th Day, Write or Wrong: Where do your inspirations come from?
Schroedingers Cat
Shipmate
I get a lot of my inspirations from feverish dreams, if I am honest. They provide some uniquely surreal concept, that I can then work something around. I guess that I might be alone in this.
I also get other pieces of inspiration from the people around, the things I see, the people I work with. Sometimes I wonder why everyone canot write, there is so much inspiration around me. The challenge for me is making some oddity of inspiration into something comprensible and story-like.
I also get other pieces of inspiration from the people around, the things I see, the people I work with. Sometimes I wonder why everyone canot write, there is so much inspiration around me. The challenge for me is making some oddity of inspiration into something comprensible and story-like.
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Also, I take inspiration from the things around me. For example, the other day I say a broken heart necklace on the ground, and I was able to use it as a starting point for the entire plot of one of my stories.
I try to avoid using writing prompts though; it feels like cheating.
The previous opus, a time-travel trilogy, I've been brooding on for roughly 25 years. It was inspired by an obituary. I can't remember the deceased guy's name but I still have the cutting somewhere. An elderly Chinese man died, and his obit in the New York Times was headlined, Whatever His Name Was, Japanese Quisling, Dies Aged 84. Now isn't that awful? What a way to be remembered! Wouldn't you do anything, to avoid having a headline like that run after you're dead? So ... what could you do? You're not dead yet, so you can do something. But, OTOH, you did sell out your nation to the Japanese (or whatever heinous crime it was thirty years ago). What you need is a bigger achievement, which will supersede that earlier disaster, right? It took me a while to find the right achievement, but time travel would fix it, you agree, and once I had that notion we were good to go amd I wrote the book in a year.
(formerly known as QLib)
But I also leapfrog off books and poems I love. Rereading Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle reminded me how when I first read it (aged 14 or so) I began keeping a diary with words in code. And because I felt there was a darker, stranger story trying to get out of this novel, I made up my own story about two sisters and a deadly lifelong rivalry between them.
For instance, the current Work in Progress is built around King Ecgfrith of Northumbria and his ill-fated attack on the Picts of Fortriu, which led to the end of Northumbria's time as the major military power of early Anglo Saxon England. And round that well-attested historical event (there's even a Pictish picture-stone which may show the actual Battle of Nechtansmere / Llyn Garan at which Ecgfrith was killed) I've woven a slightly off-centre version of the story of Drystan and Ousilla - better-known to opera buffs as Tristan and Isolde.
Which is the main and which the sub-plot? I wish I knew...
@Martin54 the 'connectivity' here reminds me of the years I spent in therapy looking at the old Sumerian myth of the descent of Inanna into the Underworld.
What Inanna needs to do is understand what death is, and experience a death of her own so that she (a sky goddess radiant with airy lightness and optimism) might understand the suffering and alienation of those around her. There is no misfortune, crisis, torment or surprise that is not in a sense her misfortune or crisis, and as she goes down the staircase into the dark, she relinquishes step by step all her privileges, jewels, ornaments, clothing, unique selfness, so that each step is a place where she can identify with another's loss.
Thank you for this.