Novelist's Desk Forum What Inspires You?

omgtatercat	What Inspires You? 15 Years Ago What are the things that inspired your stories? The entire story of Anti-Hero was inspired by a song called And The Hero Will Drown by Story of the Year. The Diary of a Werewolf was just an idea to go against Stephenie Meyer's werewolves (and I wanted to make a werewolf novel because there don't seem to be a lot in the horror genre. It's all vampires.) Light and Darkness was inspired by angels with black wings. Love and Betrayal was inspired by Greek and Roman mythology. What inspired you?
A.B. Hartselle	[no subject] 14 Years Ago People. Always people.
cloister	[no subject] 14 Years Ago All sorts of things. My first novel (don't laugh) was inspired by a Dungeons and Dragons game I once led which itself was inspired by a myth I wrote some years prior which, honestly, I have no idea what inspired that. My second novel wasn't particularly inspired by anything, but rather, was an idea I crafted rather methodically by asking the question "what book would Diana [a then-9-year-old daughter of a friend] want to read?" So I wrote that. My third novel was inspired by a book I saw lying on the sale table at Borders: a history book (non-fiction) about the Pony Express. My fourth novel was inspired (again, don't laugh) by a dream I had. It was a scary dream, but when I woke up I said to myself "wow, that would make a great story." Ultimately, it's like Stephen King wrote in "On Writing:" "There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers. Your job isn't to find these ideas, but to recognize them when they show up."