Inspiration - Place

Okay, well, my ambitious plan to blog from China completely failed, for 3 reasons: 1. Jetlag, 2. Spotty internet access, 3. China's lack of open container laws, which equaled lots of drunken stumbling down the streets of Shanghai. The upside is that now I can use China to write about how places can inspire us.

For me, place is always the initial genesis of any idea. When I walk into a beautiful or mysterious place, my mind instantly starts filling it with stories. Like these places are so full of longing and drama in their very stones, only the human emotion of a story can do them justice. Transporting the reader to these places is a vital part of any fiction writing. I fully accept that there are geniuses out there who can make up fantastic places in their minds. But for non-geniuses like myself, traveling, taking photographs and just plain getting out of the house are the first steps in creating evocative settings.

Photos by the inestimable Geoff Gailey

These are some photos from the wind whipped steps of the Great Wall an hour outside of Beijing. Before I went here, I might have described a ruin as crumbling stones. Boring, blah. But after actually being there, I know what it looks like when the narrow trunks of trees crack neat rows of cobblestones and pound the stone to fine gray dust. I know how black-backed beetles sit flicking their wings at the top of abandoned staircases, the only life for miles as the walls fade into the horizon, hazy with smoke from the burning fields far below.

Place is why writing will never be an all-day butt-in-chair affair (not even with Google Images!). Humans are visual creatures, and to create settings that our readers can see, we must first see with our own eyes. I hope the way I felt at the Great Wall will someday become a story. I know I felt the same way when I walked through the dark streets of Boston just as the first cold of fall was coming on. That feeling became my novel, Petrified, and even when the sun is out, the story (I hope) retains that chill.

What places have inspired you?

Inspiration

Some people say that the hardest part of writing is editing, some plotting. For others it's just plain applying ass to chair. But for me, the toughest step has always been the first: finding your inspiration. That singular idea you can't ignore, that starts as a tickle in the back of your mind and becomes an opus in the space of your walk home. Exciting times, and terrifying too. Is it a stupid idea? Unoriginal? Will my friends and family think I'm insane/boring/ripping off Twilight?

Inspiration is a lot like love. Once you're about 20K words in, you and your manuscript get comfortable with each other. Like any relationship, you fight sometimes, go without talking for days on end, pass lazy afternoons in front of the TV. But the beginning is complete infatuation. It still makes my heart pound to remember those first dizzying weeks of inspiration. I remember feeling out of breath and slightly queasy, staring for hours on end at two pages of ideas in single-spaced text and the cursor blink blink blinking at the end, like it's saying "Yeah? What next?"

Inspiration can come from anywhere: dreams, places, people, even other books (as long as you're not too inspired by them, ha). I've been thinking a lot about this lately - about how bad things, hard times, strange experiences can be the best inspiration - so over the next week, I'd like to spend some time thinking about where ideas come from.

P.S. I'll be blogging all this from China! Whoo!