February 24, 2008

How do you find inspiration

for a novel? More than likely,

you won't find inspiration--

inspiration will find you.

I've learned you can't go

looking for inspiration--

inspiration has to be discovered

when it isn't being searched for.

You might be walking along a trail

in a park somewhere and think of

an idea for a wilderness-themed

adventure. You might see an

article in a newspaper about an

event that happened in your town

recently. An anonymous person

donated a kidney to someone they

had never met before. A teacher who

doesn't really want to be a teacher ends

up teaching his entire life-but never

regrets it. The latter sentence is the

theme of the movie Mr. Holland's Opus.

Once inspiration hits, you have to be

prepared. Take a small notebook with

you everywhere you go. J.K. Rowling

had a notebook with her when, on a

train, she was hit with the inspiration

to write the Harry Potter series of

books. If you attend college like I do,

take the time, especially if your school's

campus is nice, and walk around campus.

You never know what ideas might come

into your mind.

Other ideas for inspirations come

from friends. In high school, the

short stories I wrote were all based

on my friends. They were pretty bad,

but back then, I was just learning how

to write short stories. I was learning

how to create three-dimensional

characters that had plots and subplots,

conflicts and resolutions in them.

I was learning how to make characters

more realistic. Those four years of high

school were more like college for me,

because I learned more about writing

than I thought I would, both in class

and while I was at lunch or during

downtime in class writing stories.

A great inspiration for your own writing

is the works of other writers. You might

find something about a character you

like in one book, such as that the character

is irresistibly stubborn, and then you might

find another character that is always getting

her heart broken in another novel. These

two character traits could be intertwined to

create one main character. I'm not telling

you to copy plots from other books. I find

that ethically and morally wrong. Once a

best-selling book about, for example,

wizards hits the shelf, you have a deluge

of books hitting the shelf about wizards

or witches or magic in general that seem

to follow the same sort of plot. And then

the idea you had about a witch who ran

her own school for young witches-well,

someone could have already written about

that, or it is along the same lines of another

book.

I never thought I could turn something like

the subject of writing into a series of columns.

But I realized that I could inspire others to

become writers or, if, like me, they haven't

been published yet, inspire them to keep

writing because one day, they could enter a

bookstore and see their best-selling book

sitting on the table in the front or in the front

window display for all to see. But how do you

keep the faith? How do you keep believing

that you will be a writer someday when you

haven't even been published? I'll talk about

that in my next column.