Inspiration

You all know the cliche writer's question: "Where do you get your ideas?"

Now, the interesting thing about this cliche is that the answer isn't cliche.  The answer varies, from something deep and profound, to a joke, to no answer at all.  I think that's because the answer is always different, for every author.  Sometimes it's different for the same author for different stories, or different parts of the same story.

Creativity is one of the most inexplicable things in the human psyche.  Personally, I think it's what the book of Genesis is talking about when it says people are "made in God's image."  It certainly makes more sense than the idea that God is a big, white-bearded guy with a Greek physique, wearing a white robe.  I think the desire to create new things, new ideas, new stories, is an almost holy thing.  Not to say that everything that gets created is holy, of course.  Like all virtues, it has a positive side, and a flip side.

Don't worry; I'm not going to wax all theological or spiritual here.  What I'm trying to say is that creativity can't be fully explained.  One moment, I'm going along with my everyday life, entering insurance data into my computer at work, the next, bam!  Idea!

Howard Tayler, author of the (quite wonderful) webcomic Schlock Mercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/) wrote that ideas are, in and of themselves, completely worthless.  It's what you do with the ideas that matters.  Until you do something with them, they just float around without form or function.

My story ideas come from... well, gosh.  I don't know!  What I do know is that I don't get the whole story at once.  A particular scene, anecdote, character, or conversation is where it starts.  "Ember of Dreams" can be traced back to a mental image of a confrontation between a brave man and an enemy armed with an unstoppable weapon.  There's a tableau on a dark, smoky plateau, two swordsmen facing each other.  One is determined to destroy the other, while the hero is determined to... win.

The problem here, of course, was that this comes near the very end of the story.  I had to write the story that got me there.  Other little flashes of inspiration suggested themselves: a magical spell that would grant the user's greatest wish; a knight who didn't believe in fear; a young man who wanted his own self-respect more than anything else in the world; a young woman who could talk to animals; elves that were half-feral, rather than the noble, ethereal Tolkien creations; and so on.

I can sometimes trace these elements back to their original sources.  The knight, for example, is based very closely on the manager I worked for in 2004; a big, strong ex-barroom bouncer named Tommy (he really did tell me once that he didn't believe in fear) provided the inspiration for Sir Thomas Southbrook, the greatest knight in the kingdom.  The teenage guy with self-esteem issues, I'm sad to say, has more than a little of myself in him.  The girl who talks to horses is based on a wish my wife has expressed.

And then there are the elves of "Ember".  I wanted some sort of fantastical creatures for my heroes to interact with.  Dwarves are... well, they're all the same.  Short, grumpy, bearded guys who are good craftsmen and swing battleaxes around.  They've become a parody of themselves.  Elves?  Well, maybe.  But I didn't want Tolkien elves, or Tad Williams Sithi, or any of the other Fair Folk I'd seen.  But then I thought about the old stone arrowheads that turn up in the British Isles.  They're relics of stone age humans, of course, but they're called... elf-bolts.

Suddenly I was thinking about that.  What if elves did use stone arrowheads?  Well, that would mean they didn't work metal.  But why not?  Elves often are depicted as having an especially close relationship with nature.  What if they viewed it as a matter of religious significance not to profane the earth by digging up ore, smelting it down, and turning it into tools and weapons?  What if they didn't even like the idea of using fire, not because it was impractical, but because to them, it was morally wrong?  The old stories of iron being a talisman against faeries suddenly made sense; it would drive them away by moral repulsion!

An entire fictitious belief system had been suggested on the basis of some old legends and nicknames.  Now I was really rolling.  At this point, I gave a phone call to my friend Andy.  We talked for a good couple of hours and I laid out everything that I had in my head.  He mostly just let me talk, bouncing ideas off him, but added some suggestions and clarifications.

So that was the process of inspiration, as far as I can remember it.  Hindsight colors things, naturally, so I can't claim to be completely right about it.  But that's pretty close to how it went down.  Unfortunately, I still hadn't actually written much of anything.  But that's a matter for later posts; I've written enough here for now.