Inspiration
Recently, I was given the suggestion to write about what inspires my stories. I don’t often think about the specifics of where my inspiration comes from as much as the feelings, themes and messages I want my stories to convey. So it was an interesting thought to take a look at both the general sources I take inspiration from and what the inspirations for some of the stories I have shared on this site were.
The funny thing is, inspiration can come from a lot of different places. A lot of the time, an idea will just strike me in the middle of a conversation and I’ll have to make a note of it somewhere so I can maybe do something with it in the future. Sometimes I’ll be inspired by music I’m listening to or a piece of art I see. Sometimes, I’m inspired by other media I’m consuming and want to create something with a different take on similar themes and narrative elements. Sometimes, it really is a matter of wanting to communicate a specific message or feeling and looking for the best way to do that. I’ve also been known to work from prompts from time to time.
I’ve mentioned this before, but a prompt is actually what got Domino started. I was entering a competition and had to select two prompts from a list to construct my story around. I chose, if I’m remembering correctly, survival and drama. I found the combination appealing since I like to focus my stories on the characters. From there, it was a matter of considering the things I like to write about - class divides, struggles with personal demons, facing impossible odds, death (I’m a ray of sunshine) and so on - and how to integrate those concepts with the theme. In the end, the ideas I wanted to explore in Domino were born. What happens to ordinary, vulnerable people when others play political games with their lives? How do they cope with that destruction? With the physical struggle to survive and the mental struggle of surviving.
For Our Importance, there wasn’t any real source of inspiration. This was one of those times where there was just an idea that I wanted to communicate. I feel like a lot of the reason people can turn a blind eye to climate change is because they fail to understand how much it matters to humanity - to themselves. I wanted to recontextualise how my readers viewed the idea. I wanted to show them that the world would endure without us one way or another and that we were only setting ourselves up for a painful demise in the long run. The Earth doesn’t care what temperature it is. Life doesn’t need specific species around to continue. But humans certainly need the Earth a certain way and we’re killing ourselves. I chose to follow a nameless and ultimately insignificant character and chose to give him a gruesome end for this purpose.
I don’t write poetry nearly as much as I used to, but it generally comes from a similar place. Rather than being inspired by anything specific, it’s usually an outlet to communicate a specific feeling, philosophy or idea that I have. In the case of Of Ruination, I’d been thinking about how I hadn’t been really using my mind as much since I got sick and that tangented into thinking about how the human brain gradually decays over time and where that can end up. Disturbing thoughts in a lot of ways, but I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to no longer remember anything about yourself and your life a lot of the time anymore. In my mind, it seems like it wouldn’t be that different to wandering a hot desert, desperate for water.
The inspiration behind the stories that I write for Stories About Borders episodes is a touch obvious - and, in fairness, a bit more forced. It’s not dissimilar to writing for a prompt since I have to write something short that fits the theme of the current cycle.
As an example, for The Orchard, I had to write a story with magic at its centre. Something of a fantasy story was pretty much required by the theme. Over the course of the previous episodes, I had talked about two things a lot in that cycle; my preference for hard magic systems and how interesting the ordinary person becomes when surrounded by the fantastical. I wanted to focus on those two things. This gave me an excuse to visit a concept and magic system I’d had brewing for a long time and also gave rise to the character of Karsten. After that, it was just a matter of putting a story to it.
When I wrote Raising the Stakes, I wanted to put a twist on the theme of friendship. I wanted to show one of the darker and harder aspects of the theme in the loss of someone dear. I also wanted to raise the question of the “bad guys” being the ones with a powerful bond instead of the heroes. Sometimes it’s fun to take a bright and happy theme and put a twist on it that raises some interesting questions.
All of this isn’t even covering some of the more generalised sources of inspiration that I listed in my first paragraph, but that’s kind of the point. Inspiration can come from many different places. It certainly does for me. It’s always exciting when that flash of inspiration hits and you can dive into a new idea and meld it into something new and compelling.
