INSPIRATION PLAYING IN A TOWN NEAR YOU

Let's talk about inspiration.  Without it, there are no stories or novels ever written. Where do you find it? The question is close to the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" That's the question people are always asking writers. Stephen King replied that he found his ideas in Syracuse. He can be funny, no one said he couldn't. Most of us don't know how to answer because ideas come from everywhere, from every direction. What are ideas? Inspirations! People rarely think to ask you where the inspirations come from, but ideas or inspirations, they're interchangeable anyway.

Recently I was inspired to write a short story from a single word. Some writers on Facebook were talking about how they didn't like vampires to sparkle the way they do in The Twilight vampire novels and movies. It was wimpy, it was lame. I kept thinking, Sparkle, Sparkle, Sparkle. I kept thinking, that's not a very scary word, but...what if it could be scary, what would a scary sparkle look like? I challenged myself to write a story where some being who sparkles is the epitome of fear. The result is SPARKLE-A-Tale-of-the-Devil. The story is also in my collection of stories, SUBWAY-COLLECTION-Dark Stories to Read on the Go. From those who have read it and responded I believe I was able to take an innocent little word that usually denotes flighty, fairy, pretty things and gave it a twist that reminds us dark, devilish things might also sparkle.

Another serendipity inspiration followed and it came from a picture. A book cover, specifically. My cover artist, Neil Jackson, is an inspiration in his own right the way he can take a book title and create a cover for it that makes the whole idea of the book or story pop and come alive for prospective readers. One day he offered a folder of e-book covers for the ridiculous low price of $10 per cover. I saw one that caught my attention, but I had no story or book that fit it. The cover showed a house bathed in blue shadows, a looming edifice, and it scared me just looking at it. I bought the cover. Immediately a story idea was inspired about the house on the cover, the walls inside the house, and what resulted within 48 hours was a novelette called WALLS OF THE DEAD . (It is Free on Kindle for the next couple of days if you want to give it a read.)

These might seem extreme examples of inspiration, but they aren't. Writers can be inspired by the Muse from the utterance of a single word, a picture of a house, an idea someone might be talking about, a man walking down a street, a tree that stands lonely and crooked in a field. Ideas, of course, are everywhere. When non-writers say to a writer, "I have an idea for you..." writers groan inside. Because ideas are cheap, ideas are floating around us every minute of our waking day. It is not ideas that are so hard to come by, as I've proved by my own examples, it's being INSPIRED by those ideas. Your idea might leave me cold. My idea will do the same unless it is backed by excitement, inspiration, and an urgency to see the idea come alive in a story or a novel.

What do you do if you get an inspiration? Why, if you're a working writer and you know what's good for you, you immediately get started writing with that inspiration as the driver of your mind-car. One thing about inspiration is that it can be fickle. If you delay too long, if you question it and say to yourself, oh, that's dumb, I can't write a story about something scary that sparkles, then it's all over. Without having some faith and confidence, those little inspirations can disappear just as quickly as they come.

I encourage you to trust your Muse. I encourage you to write what inspires you whether it is a small inspiration that gives you a short story or a big inspiration that leads you into the wilderness of a long piece of work like the novel. Does it always work? I can't guarantee that. I can't even guarantee it for myself. It's just as possible my ideas about the word "sparkle" and my ideas for the "walls that talk" could have fallen flat and dead. But I coddled the Muse, I thanked it, I played with the ideas the way a child plays, and the inspiration lasted through the entire story writing. You can't depend on anything in this world and that's the truth, you know that's the truth, but if you follow your inspirations you're not wasting your time, you're being open and creative and giving back to the world that inspires you.