Inspire Me

I don't know about you but I find my inspiration in the strangest places. Snatches of songs are the best, a stray lyric that wanders into my head and stays there, refusing to leave no matter what I do.

My latest plot is currently forming in my head, a twisted tale that mixes the destructive romance of Wuthering Heights with a chaotic, dystopian rebellion. Inspired by the newMy Chemical Romance album I have been plagued by a new character who gives me no peace, forcing me to create him and all the swirling artwork that covers his arms. I have to be able to visualise a character to be able to write them and then everything else slots into place.

I am one of those writers who stacks notebooks one on top of the other. I scribble on the front pages, a snap of an idea and then I leave them, abandoned but not forgotten to return to later. I have a lot of ideas and will be briefly sucked in by each and every one of them but it takes a really strong idea to properly pull me in. That is what happened with Being Lucky, an idea formed and then I kept coming back to it until I wrote it. It's okay to abandon the other ideas, to have them and dwell on them briefly and move on. You never know when you might return to them or what they might inspire.

At the moment I am quite taken with winding links that cross between books without being obvious. Until now I have had the town of Winterdale, a small town somewhere where most of my books and ideas are based. My latest novel wouldn't fit there, it needs to chase across sprawling landscapes and it needs to be rebellious and impossible to contain. Winterdale was not the right setting and so I decided that one of my other characters might wander across and within seconds he just fit there so well it was like he had always been meant to be there.

That's what I'm encouraging today. Take a character from an old book and see if you can place them in another. See if they fit there. Characters are simply too good to waste and more often than not the peripheral characters are fabulously fickle, fitting in whenever and wherever, like terrible attention seekers!

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