Bisky's Twitterling's Scribbles! discussion
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What sparked your novel?
Pictures. I have a whole wall of interesting photos I have found off things like Pinterest that really get my imagination flowing with new ideas. I mean a picture is worth a thousand words right? I feel then that I am here to write those many words and make a story out of it :)
For me, it's almost always a person (an actor). I think- wow, he would make a great character and go from there.
for me it's a mix of different things, from breathtaking sceneries, to books, movies and songs
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@Nicole wow thats an interesting approach :3
@Kamil I love going on long drives in the countryside here! It really gets my imagination going! :D
What sparks my novels:1. The Easel Chronicles...well it was a wonderful poem I read and I just happened to be watching Lord of the Rings for the gazillionth time in the background and...BOOM my idea started to work its way in my mind. I could not sleep or do anything else for the next week as i jotted down the idea.
2. The Broken Throne...I was listening to soundtracks of great fantasy movies and doing some research on civil wars in the Middle Ages and the idea cam full blast.
I can say the books are sparked at random moments when I am doing random things
It was born from a repetitive dream initially. Now its fueled by music, certain places and locales I've seen on television or in person, and pictures.
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@Susan I love stories created from dreams! :3
Bisky wrote: "@Samuel, sounds very fantasy! :D I got the idea for creating a world when I was playing WoW. It was like living inside :3@Susan I love stories created from dreams! :3"
Me too! I'm also guilty of playing with things I've seen on WOW. I'm not an avid player myself, but I absolutely love watching the graphics and all the different characters, the magic and abilities, worlds and villages etc. :)
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Bisky wrote: "I was only ever good at PvP and I kinda sucked at that too haha. I just enjoyed walking around in the world :3 It was so lovely! I miss vanilla :x"Lol, Hey I sucked too...I hated getting attacked by an alliance though while I was 'oohing' and 'ahhing'...lol!
My novel is based on the news, mainly attacks on contraception. And I learned of the quiverfull movement which teaches that women are only fulfilled by giving birth. It's kinda hard to write this because I read and write mostly fantasy. Lately I've gotten into contemporary fiction but I've never been a big fan of sci-fi or dystopian. With the exceptions of movies like Waterworld and the Star Trek movies. So this idea surprised me a lot. I tried to write other stuff that I'm used to and just couldn't stay interested. =p
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@Dia I think a story calls to us to write. I think its great when an author writes differently to what they read, I think it shows talents as you can transend genres :3
Life experiences spark mine, and hypothetical questions too. My ideas often come to me during the quietest parts of the night where my brain just takes off and does its own thing.
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Amber wrote: "Life experiences spark mine, and hypothetical questions too. My ideas often come to me during the quietest parts of the night where my brain just takes off and does its own thing."@bisky...See, that's why I sucked, I had no idea of all the skills and things I could have done to avoid it! lol!!
@Amber That's awesome! I tend to do that a lot myself as well! I too have a brain that won't shut off when my eyes close at night, but that can be a good thing for us writer types at times though, right? :D
Just about anything and everything sparks ideas for both short stories and novels . . . people I see on the street, events taking place in other books and TV shows and movies, causing me to ask What if? The sources for ideas and the muse never stops coming and that's a good thing! :)
A reference to 'Dwarven Riflemen' in WoW- it got me to thinking about all of the problems with introducing firearms to a medieval fantasy setting, and how I might do it without screwing everything up. The Science Fiction novel that we are currently working on was sparked by a National Geographic special about aliens invading.
My current novel was actually sparked by an article in the New York Times on the life of an aspiring professional football player. There was a scene I was so struck by where the author depicted the player in question taking a bunch of painkillers, and it really struck me. I get inspired by all sorts of things, though...my last novel was inspired by my travels to the Canadian Shield, and my next one was inspired by a random offhand insult in a conversation!
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Thinking back, I've always been interested in creating things. Towns/buildings with blocks and legos, forts outside, short stories, short comics, movies (I made movies in which I had an evil clone, I played both parts, but the clone and I were never in the same clip xD), video games, and now writing. I've been interested in story writing for a while.
But I think anime really drove me into writing an actual novel. :3
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I had a bunch of Beanie Babies and other stuffed toys, and I had placed called Beanie Babie-ville in my living room and my parents' room was a faraway land. x3 The mayor was a penguin named Penguy x3
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Always think I should be a writer for the new my little pony show considering lol
Bisky wrote: "@Samuel, sounds very fantasy! :D I got the idea for creating a world when I was playing WoW. It was like living inside :3@Susan I love stories created from dreams! :3"
I basically love fantasy where I am God...not being blasphemous but there is that thrill of being the creator and master
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@Samuel - It's fun having so much control x3
The desire for wealth and fame...My Rock Series of books is about a normal individual who saves a rock star from drowning and gets thrown into that world of wealth and fame. It's a universal dream. We've all thought about it at one time or another. Winning the lottery, Being discovered by a famous director to be put in his films, making the application for the iPhone that makes millions of dollars, being in a band that gets picked up and thrown into the spotlight by a huge music label, or writing the next Harry Potter series that makes you the next billion dollar author. The main storyline in by book is about the normal guy who becomes a singer, but there is also a billionaire video game maker, a secretive group who uses nefarious means to accumulate wealth, a group of Russian who are open to anything that will make money, and a famous movie star who becomes the mayor of Carmel (look at Clint Eastwood's biography on wikopedia)
So there are various story-lines that wrap around the central theme of accumulating wealth and being famous and whether or not either of those things, so many of us, so deeply desire, actually lead to happiness, or if instead they lead to misery.
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@J - deviantART is massing xD - I'm the same when it comes to enjoying the writing process because you have realistic face in mind. :3 Or even an anime drawing. xD
What sparked me was the work of Douglas Adams and the Number 42!
Bisky wrote: "My bedroom was called Hyrulia (yes ripped off from Zelda lol) my my little ponies would take trecks across the great plains of the upper landing to invade my brothers room to war with his action me..."I had a bunch of horses and ponies too. I was so upset when they got mold from storage and I had to get rid of them.
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I was reading a writing prompt and got the idea for my book series.The prompt was about meeting someone in a bookstore and discussing his novel with him. Several years later, you return to that bookstore and see him, now a best-selling author, giving a book-signing. You are getting your book signed. What conversation would you have with the author?
...or something along those lines.
From there other story-lines came into play. It evolved from this prompt to:
1. What if the book the author got famous for is actually from an idea you shared with him x years ago at the bookstore?
2. What if you are the best-selling author, and you're the one that stole the book idea from him?
3. What if he agreed that you use his idea for the novel?
4. What would be his motive? Money? Or because you know a secret about him, that he is dying to keep hidden?
5. What if the you find out that idea wasn't even his originally, but a dead person's?
6. What if this dead person was haunting him?
Yeah...I don't know how I got all of these ideas that prompt, but it formed the novel I'm editing now.
I get my ideas from all over the place. Music is a good vein for me. I listen to movie soundtracks and a lot of stuff without lyrics and get a feel for something. A vibe...whatever you want to call it. Sometimes I get ideas from errant thoughts or dreams, maybe an image pops into my head. My one self-published novel started with a daydream...an image of a girl lost in the woods (pretty standard)...and she was wearing a red cloak...Red Riding Hood. Okay, that's been done. What if she's just dressed like Red Riding Hood? A normal girl lost...taken. And what if the guy hired to find her is on the list of suspects? What if the guy sent to find her looks like a Monster?
That's basically where my thoughts started and as soon as I thought Monster, I had my idea and my main character. The rest flowed easily enough. :)
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@Gareth that sounds so good! :O
The Curse Merchant was basically inspired by the city of Baltimore. I commute in to Balmer every day from cow country, and one winter morning I looked at the bare tree limbs on the side of the freeway and thought about the old concept of the dark forest, and how it once represented a real terror to pre-industrial travelers. Then I got into the city and spotted the alleys between buildings downtown, and wondered about what happens every day beneath our feet... and we never even know about it? Those two thoughts spun together to create my milieu. The city of Baltimore is still a kind of background "character" in the stories.
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Baltimore seems like it's alive itself. I like that. :3
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I'm also an aspiring filmmaker. I've acted a little in the past, so knowing that some of my favorite movies were adapted from books, spurred me on. Also, growing up, I didn't see too many character-driven roles for women of color, and back then, I guess I wanted to put my stamp on that. LOL. Now thanks to the internet, there are all kinds of genres and cultures represented in comical, dramatic, sexy, and adventurous ways. I still want to create those type of stories, though.
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A newspaper article I read in 1964 about two missing teens lit the fire under my first novel.
Safe as Houses grew, in part, from a dream: vampires were everywhere outside but I knew I was safe because I was inside a home. I floated up to the attic and saw a little fairy and knew she was the guardian of the house. She had her head tilted as though she were listening. Then she spoke. I drifted closer to hear what she was saying. "And therefore," she said to the vampires outside, "you may come in." And an evil white form slipped in through the roof! I woke with a start, wrote the dream down, and wove it into a story about a world overrun with vampires -- but in your home, life goes on like normal. Or does it? How can you be safe when your guardian spirit invites the vampires in?
I started writing my comic whodunits because I love reading good comic novels but there is just about none out there so partly I wrote my Bigfoot series so I could read them. As well as that, I just have to write and I just have to write comedy.
An over active teenage imagination. Then as I got older I molded it into what it is today. But what started me writing was a prompt for our daily journal in 8th grade. Back then I did a lot of fan fiction by taking my favorite tv shows and mixing them together. Now I see things, instances and my mind takes them and sees what it can do with it. Dreams also inspire me.
My Wild Sparks series was inspired by people I was a fan of or worked with. There's also a lot of myself in many of my characters mixed with other personalities. Music also fueled my story. My playlist correlates to what's happening in each chapter.
I almost always start from an interesting (to me) set of real events or circumstances and then run what-if or how'd-that-happen scenarios against them. For instance, I have a short story, Mourning Jimmy Crooks, that appears in my anthology, Buses & Bears, Bullets & Stones, that got it's start from a local newspaper account of a motorhome crash. When I read it, my first thought was, how in the world did they get themselves into that predicament? Then I decided that, no matter what really happened, I could improve on it, so I did.
What sparks your novels? :]